[HN Gopher] Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7...
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Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Author : ra7
Score : 206 points
Date : 2023-12-20 17:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| billy99k wrote:
| The problem is that it's not a person driving, it's a vehicle
| that's property of a company. If that vehicle kills someone, the
| company is responsible. Who goes to prison? The company owners?
| CEO? Vehicle engineer(s)?
|
| update: I see we have some Waymo engineers in the house!!!!!!!
| (which is why I'm getting downvoted)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Surely this is settled law? I would have thought cars crash due
| to mechanical fault quite often.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly act
| as a line of defense against faulty computer decision making.
| We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot crashes a
| plane.
|
| Edit: I am wrong Ill take the L
| ibbih wrote:
| It...is a driverless car.
| billy99k wrote:
| "Probably the human behind the wheel that failed to properly
| act as a line of defense against faulty computer decision
| making. We don't send Boeing engineers to jail when autopilot
| crashes a plane"
|
| But most airplanes still have pilots. We are talking about
| cars with no drivers.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| In most plane crashes, nobody is sent to jail.
| billy99k wrote:
| ..Because they're dead.
| dboreham wrote:
| Or Boeing executives.
| nothercastle wrote:
| People die in industrial accidents all the time and nobody is
| responsible. Minor fines that it
| neom wrote:
| In the instance of *Tempe, uber was almost criminally liable,
| but the safty driver took the fall:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/arizona-prosecutor-wont...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Legal...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Tempe, not phoenix. Also that one was tough because the
| pedestrian was pushing a bicycle across a four lane road at
| night and not at an intersection or crosswalk. How many human
| drivers would have hit her also? I'm surprised the backup
| driver got charged at all in this case, if they were driving
| the car themselves and the same accident occurred without any
| tech at all, it would have probably been a non-interesting
| case of jaywalking gone wrong and the driver might not have
| even been cited.
| meindnoch wrote:
| We'll fine them to oblivion! They will need to pay at least 15k
| USD per person killed!!
| vlovich123 wrote:
| For better or worse, we generally don't imprison anyone when
| machines fail unless there's evidence of gross negligence or
| incompetence. See space shuttle disasters, collapsing bridges,
| train derailments, building collapses etc etc. It's possible
| that there should be some jail time because it's hard often to
| assess whether it's a cultural issue (management), a team-
| specific issue, or an individual issue. That's why post mortems
| that are blameless are the best ones - it documents the failure
| and what changes should be enacted as a result.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I don't think anyone goes to prison for most actual accidents,
| whether automotive or industrial. There would need to be
| deliberate negligence for that.
| billy99k wrote:
| If you kill someone. Intentional or not, you will most likely
| serve jail time. are you telling me that if all vehicles were
| driver-less, there would cease to be any sort of jail time
| for any death-related to an accident?
| dboreham wrote:
| > If you kill someone. Intentional or not, you will most
| likely serve jail time.
|
| Is this true? My admittedly small data sample suggests it
| isn't.
| pie420 wrote:
| This is categorically false. The VAST majority of
| automobile accidents that result in deaths, even though
| drivers were at fault do not result in jail time. Even a
| large part of DUIs that result in deaths only result in
| community service and probation.
|
| Source: idk
| renewiltord wrote:
| Surely no different than if some company's cars have commonly
| failing brakes causing people to kill other people. The brake
| failures will eventually show up in NHTSA data and the company
| will be responsible.
|
| If the process of this company's brakes failing reaches a
| sufficient degree of negligence, those people will go to jail.
|
| However the process can take some time. For instance, only a
| couple of people were sent to jail for Volkswagen's fraud since
| Germany protects its own for the most part. One of them was
| jailed when the US grabbed him in Florida while he was trying
| to return to Germany from being on vacation.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We already barely punish drivers for killing people (compared
| to other people who produce deadly outcomes by taking
| comparable risks). Society seems to have already decided that
| cars are worth sacrificing a couple lives every now and then.
|
| And if a company is found to produce cars that kill an
| unexpected number of people we already have criminal laws to
| deal with it. These are hardly the first heavy machines we
| build. Even on normal cars you already have this issue with
| stuck pedals, engines that might not turn off and similar
| manufacturing defects.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The problem is that it's not a person driving, it's a vehicle
| that's property of a company. If that vehicle kills someone,
| the company is responsible. Who goes to prison?
|
| If a car causes injury or death or property damage due to a
| manufacturing defect, then there is chain-of-commerce liability
| for everyone between the manufacturer and the buyer, most
| jurisdictions make the operator responsible for assuring it is
| maintained in safe condition as well. And none of these
| liabilities excluded the others.
|
| But, no, usually, unless there is an unusual degree of
| intentionaloty and/or deception, no one will go to prison.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| No, you're getting downvoted because you raise a point that's
| negative and tangential to what's being discussed, which is a
| potencial 90%+ reduction in crashes, and therefore injuries and
| fatalities.
|
| As someone who has lost close ones to car accidents, I don't
| give a shit about liability if we reduce casualties by an order
| of magnitude. I didn't downvote you but it doesn't surprise me
| that your take is unpopular.
| doppio19 wrote:
| I can believe it. I rode in a Waymo for the first time a couple
| days ago and it was incredible. No problems with the rain or bad
| San Francisco drivers. It was a really smooth ride and I felt
| extremely safe.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| I was under the impression the LIDAR approach was compromised
| by rain? Did something change or did I not understand it right?
| ra7 wrote:
| That's just some good old Musk/Tesla propaganda. Waymo has
| developed a really high resolution lidar + some software
| magic means rain is no longer an issue for them.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Thanks. Any recommended reading links on this?
| ra7 wrote:
| Their 5th gen Lidar point clouds compared it to previous
| gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COgEQuqTAug&t=11601s
|
| They have a ton of literature at
| https://waymo.com/research/ and tech talks on YouTube
| (search talks by Drago Anguelov). They make heavy use of
| simulators [1] where they simulate weather events and
| create their own weather maps [2]. It's a very
| sophisticated stack.
|
| [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2021/06/SimulationCity.html
|
| [2] https://waymo.com/blog/2022/11/using-cutting-edge-
| weather-re...
| jessriedel wrote:
| Thanks!
| guiomie wrote:
| The kind of comment I expect from hacker news, thanks!
|
| Its impressive how the lidar resolution evolved as per
| the youtube video. The color added, i wonder if its post-
| processing.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Probably using remote human operators to make numbers look
| better.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I thought the opposite. I thought this was one of the main
| reasons in favor of LIDAR vs regular cameras.
| altgoogler wrote:
| The current Waymo driver uses cameras, RADAR and LIDAR, which
| are meant to compliment each other's capabilities.
|
| https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-
| this/episode/10386-the...
| WawaFin wrote:
| there are many video showing waymo trips during rain or even
| (heavy) fog
|
| few examples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aBNYcBoLI ;
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8TGFA6SfAo
| passwordoops wrote:
| Nice... Does the NHTSA have independent data to support the
| claim? Because if not, I'm taking this as PR masquerading as a
| data project
| webel0 wrote:
| Better NHTSA testing/benchmarks/regulations would help the
| entire industry at this point. After the cruise debacle, we
| need more than just, "our internal metrics show."
| happytiger wrote:
| You should imo. With cruise taking a nose dive, it's clearly a
| priority to establish themselves as the "remaining alternative"
| in the marketplace. Especially given the problematic data that
| has emerged in this industry over the last few years.
|
| Consider that the entire article starts with, "Safety leads
| everything we do at Waymo." A _clear_ and almost painfully
| direct PR to what took down Cruise last week. You could almost
| add "unlike our competitors" to the headlines haha
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If they're lying and you can prove it, you can make a lot of
| money. Lying in a press release is securities fraud, and there
| are some nice whistleblower statutes that can give you a big
| payout.
| acdha wrote:
| There's a gap between outright fraud and analysis not making
| a completely accurate comparison. In this topic it's tricky
| to make sure you're comparing representative trips: for
| example, one study earlier this year found that Tesla's
| reported safety improvement disappeared after accounting for
| disparities in the age of the drivers, the type of driving,
| age of the vehicle, etc. - teenagers making bad choices cause
| a lot of crashes but the kind of people who buy a high-end
| car tend to be much older and are less likely to drive like
| that in any vehicle. Waymo is definitely saying things which
| look like they're trying to compare apples to apples but it's
| not hard to trip over data like this even if your intentions
| are fully honest. The fact that they're publishing data and
| encouraging independent review is a good sign.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Laughing in Elon Musk.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Agree. The NHTSA Standing General Order (SGO) 2021 [1] requires
| reporting of crashes involving vehicles equipped with SAE Level
| 2 ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) or higher when the
| system is engaged. However, the data only started being
| collected in June 2021, and my understanding is the NHTSA
| claims it's still too early to draw statistically significant
| conclusions.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2023-04/Second-A...
| Mageek wrote:
| NHTSA standing general order crash rates are a mandated and
| publicly available data source. That's what the study is based
| on.
| buryat wrote:
| i only recently realized that it's "way more"
| avarun wrote:
| Huh?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The name, I presume. "Waymo" = "way mo", that is, "way more".
| avarun wrote:
| That's not at all where it comes from though. It's
| referring to a "way" forward in "mo"bility.
| xnx wrote:
| "a new WAY forward in MObility" (emphasis mine)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo
| wongarsu wrote:
| I know Waymo are the investing a lot into the PR that makes them
| seem successful, but they are the only company I actually see on
| track to delivering autonomous cars (on existing infrastructure).
|
| I'm still a bit torn on whether autonomous cars are a good thing
| once you consider all the second and third order effects (even
| more cars on the streets, less investment into better modes of
| transport, and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok
| with sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix). But I have to
| applaud Waymo for their great execution on a very difficult
| problem.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| > and traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with
| sitting in bad traffic and watching Netflix
|
| This one could go either way I think, traffic might actually
| improve once autonomous driving is the standard.
|
| I also kinda-sorta hope that if autonomous driving takes over,
| that cars end up gaining the ability to switch onto and off of
| rails, I think this would be the ideal end-state... people
| still maintain the ability to move independently of each other
| but we have the improved safety of transport on rails.
| techterrier wrote:
| Like crappy little trains with no capacity?
| xnx wrote:
| Magic little trains that can take you from and to anywhere.
| ghaff wrote:
| The thing is the _average_ car lifetime in the US is about 12
| years so, so even if you assume autonomous driving
| "everywhere" is available in 10-20 years, that means you
| probably don't have a vast majority autonomous fleet for
| maybe 50 years. It certainly would be politically infeasible
| for the government to tell people they _have_ to buy new
| cars.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I agree that the existing car stock will take a decade or
| two to age out, but I can't see any reason it takes 50
| years to get to a majority autonomous fleet. Maintenance
| costs for cars in autonomous fleet will be significantly
| lower due to standardization and economies of scale, so
| non-autonomous cars will look relatively expensive in
| comparison (beyond being less convenient), causing them to
| be scrapped sooner than you'd otherwise expect.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| I agree, my original post did not imply this transition
| would happen quickly, I think transitioning to automated
| vehicles will rely more on society changing, so at least
| one generation from the youngest today... and as far as
| requiring people to get automated cars, if they're safe
| enough, it will be like outlawing drunk driving, ie
| you're infringing on others right to live if you don't
| use an autonomous vehicle. The corollary is that right
| now there should be laws strictly controlling the use of
| autonomous vehicles.
| jessriedel wrote:
| OK. I read your comment as saying that it would happen
| slowly, not quickly, which is what I was disagreeing
| with. Personally I think the economic advantages of
| routinely using a self-driving taxi service will drive
| most people to simply not buy a new car when their old
| one wears out, and that this will happen many years
| before human-driven cars are outlawed (or, more likely
| for a while, regulated/taxed very heavily without being
| completely illegal).
| madars wrote:
| You don't even need rails for traffic to improve. Just think
| at what happens when a traffic light goes green: human
| drivers slowly, one-by-one, cross the intersection. Whereas a
| platoon of self-driving cars can, in principle, just
| accelerate (or brake) simultaneously. On highways this also
| improves drag/energy efficiency and has already been tested
| in Europe as part of EU Truck Platooning Challenge.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| My only thought was rails truly require little intelligence
| for autonomy, and require less maintenance (or at least
| less involved maintenance), but just doing some armchair
| engineering...
| ortusdux wrote:
| I can't find the report, but IIRC there was a study that
| calculated that autonomous driving could triple the carrying
| capacity of highways because they could safely reduce
| following distance. They also estimated fuel/energy savings
| due to them being able to collectively draft of each other.
| bsder wrote:
| Yeah, right, ever seen "following distance" at rush hour in
| a US city? I've got a higher chance of seeing a unicorn.
|
| In reality, self-driving cars would help by increasing
| following distance and leaving a genuine gap so people
| don't crash _every goddamn day_ on the same arterial roads.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think rails are safer than rubber tires.
| Metal-on-metal contact has way less friction, which makes for
| much worse stopping distance and worse safety especially at
| crossings. Having grade-separated dedicated infrastructure
| _does_ improve safety, especially if there's no human drivers
| involved, but we can do that just fine with pavement in
| tunnels or elevated roadways.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Very good points... intuitively, rail seems safer (and
| simpler to automate?), but your points have changed my
| mind... Now I wonder though, how do modern roller-coasters
| stop so suddenly? Magnetic breaks?
| devilbunny wrote:
| Electromagnetic brakes are used, but the biggest
| difference is that the weight of passengers is a much
| bigger portion of total weight (you don't have a
| locomotive and the cars are not nearly as heavy per
| passenger) a decelerating quickly is part of the appeal.
| If passengers on trains were unencumbered with stuff and
| strapped in as on roller coasters, they could be built to
| do it too.
| bluGill wrote:
| Rails are safer because vehciles are more predictable -
| they are always on the track, with only limited places
| where they can switch tracks, and you can control that
| externally ensuring there are no conflicts. Rails can
| handle more people because in the form of a train they can
| pack in a lot more people. Cars use a lot of space for
| engine and luggage compartments.
| supercheetah wrote:
| I can see a possible future where the are less cars because
| people don't feel the need to own one, and are just fine with
| calling an autonomous cab.
| allanrbo wrote:
| But just because fewer people own one personally, will that
| necessarily mean fewer cars on the road? Might still be an
| increase in cars, but with a different ownership model. It's
| tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| There are two questions that may have different answers:
|
| 1. Will it mean fewer total cars? Probably. If I have to
| drive to work and then back home, and you do to, and we
| each own cars to do it, that's at least two cars. If I can
| take a Waymo to work, and then it can take you to work,
| that's only one car.
|
| 2. Will it mean fewer cars _on the road_? (Or, perhaps, let
| 's say fewer car-miles driven.) Plausibly not. If I drive
| from home (A) to work (B), and you drive from home (C) to
| work (D), then if we own cars, we drive A-B and C-D. If we
| use Waymo, it may drive A-B-C-D, which is longer by the B-C
| leg. That takes up space on the road.
|
| So we may have fewer total cars, but more car-miles driven,
| and therefore more traffic and congestion.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The most relevant stat though is the number of miles of car
| usage. If there are ~20% the number of cars, but each car is
| used 10x as much, we're worse off. If nobody owns a car but
| always calls a cab, the cab might do twice as many miles
| deadheading to the pickup. And instead of lasting 15 years, a
| typical car might only last 2 years because it's getting 10x
| the milage per day. So fewer cars might result in more
| gridlock, noise and tire particulate pollution. Fewer cars
| might mean just as many cars built per year.
| makerofthings wrote:
| Where I live, I can get a cheap taxi, any time, to anywhere I
| might want to go, through an app. The only difference between
| that and Waymo seems to be that it is controlled by a meat
| sack rather than a computer. I don't see autonomous cars as
| all that different to what I have now.
| Axien wrote:
| Where I live is similar, it's just the prices are
| prohibitive. Round trips just to locations within five or
| 10 miles of my house cost upwards of $50-$60. I would end
| up paying 2-3k a month for Uber/Lyft.
|
| Owning a car is simply more economical. Now if I could buy
| into fractional ownership of a fleet of vehicles, that may
| make financial sense for me.
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| That's less cars in garages, not on the roads.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I agree that the autonomous cars are likely to cause a shift
| away from car ownership, reducing the total number of cars
| (which reduces the impact of making all these cars). It might
| also drastically cut down the required size of parking lots,
| which especially in America might be a big improvement.
|
| But if you own the car, it's just waiting wherever you left
| it. If you have an autonomous cab, it has to make an extra
| trip from wherever it dropped off the last driver to wherever
| it's picking you up. That alone increases the number of cars
| on the road. And that's before you consider the cab
| potentially driving a holding pattern when nobody is actively
| using or calling it.
|
| But most of all roads are governed by induced demand. People
| would take a lot more and longer trips if there was the
| option to just teleport to the destination. The main
| downwards pressure on the number of trips is the time
| investment. That's why adding more lanes to roads often
| doesn't reduce traffic (outside of a short adjustment
| period): faster trips means more people willing to take it,
| which fills up that lane. But a trip people weren't willing
| to do for 40 minutes behind the wheel they might take if it's
| instead 60 minutes watching Netflix in a driverless car.
| Which makes the roads fuller and thus slower for everyone.
| rurp wrote:
| Another big negative I think is underconsidered is that a
| Google owned self driving car fleet will be absolutely
| plastered with video ads and physical user tracking if they
| dominate the market enough to get away with it.
|
| Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common
| at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Gmail is not like this, and Gmail is free. Waymo will not
| want to degrade a paid experience with intrusive ads anymore
| than Uber or Lyft do.
| ambrose2 wrote:
| Gmail isn't like this because they read all of your emails
| HALtheWise wrote:
| Google stopped using information from emails as part of
| ad selection years ago, the ads shown in Gmail are based
| entirely on the other ad personalization data they have
| from other Google properties. They obviously still parse
| email contents for spam blocking and such, but that seems
| like a necessary part of running any webmail service, and
| not a profit center for them.
|
| I guess it's always possible that they're lying about it,
| but given the depth of the regulatory and public
| relations fiasco that would cause I'd be very surprised.
| johnfn wrote:
| This is not true: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/
| 10434152?hl=en#:~:tex....
| bavent wrote:
| As an aside, usually those gas station ads are mutable. There
| are unlabeled buttons on the sides of the monitor - press
| them. One of them mutes it. I have yet to find a gas station
| at which this won't work.
| baseballdork wrote:
| It's feels like it's about 50/50 on whether or not that
| button is broken when I pull up to one of those pumps.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| "adblock detected! It is a violation of our terms of service
| to wear noise cancelling earphones, pulling over."
| csallen wrote:
| They already have those video ads in a lot of taxis. And of
| course public transit has been plastered with paper ads for
| decades now. So what you're describing isn't much of a change
| from the status quo. Unless you believe the advent of self-
| driving cars will lead to people being okay with ads in the
| vehicles they own or lease themselves, which I think is
| highly unlikely.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| You mean like the (sometimes unmutable) video ads I've seen
| in practically every traditional taxi for years now?
|
| That ship sailed a while ago and didn't need Google to push
| it.
| tomComb wrote:
| Windows has ads (and you pay for it), Chrome OS and android
| have never had ads, so it doesn't follow that Waymo will have
| ads due to Google.
| janice1999 wrote:
| Chrome OS and Android are surveillance/data capture
| platforms designed to funnel data to an advertising giant,
| including being caught secretly sending location data
| against users wishes more than once.
| grecy wrote:
| > _even more cars on the streets, .. , and traffic will get a
| lot worse_
|
| I strongly believe it will go the other way, i.e. the 'robo-
| taxi' vision. Once cars can pick us up, take us where we want
| and then disappear, very few people will want to own their own
| car. I honestly think the vast majority of people already don't
| want to own one, but we don't have a better option. Why would a
| sane person want to deal with the maintenance, insurance,
| repairs, depreciation, etc.
|
| Cars will just show up, take us places then go away to get
| someone else. We won't need nearly as many of them, and we
| won't need to dedicate so much of our cities to them, and
| especially not to parking them. We will be able to reclaim our
| cities.
|
| NOTE: Old School automakers who can't/won't/don't adapt are
| going to push back on this HARD. But I still think it will
| happen.
|
| For the record, I'm a car guy. I _love_ cars. I will likely
| always have one for the weekends. If I was going into a city or
| commuting, I would take the robi-taxi every time.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Why would a sane person want to deal with the maintenance,
| insurance, repairs, depreciation, etc.
|
| Because it will probably still be cheaper if they use it
| regularly (as is owning in most cases). Because they want a
| specifically equipped vehicle for young kids/outdoor
| activities/etc. Because when they want a car, they want one
| right now.
|
| I'm also skeptical that, if you own a vehicle, it would make
| any sense to then also rent robo-taxis locally. Certainly I
| can reserve a private car for an evening event today but it
| would be 10x or more the cost of parking/gas.
| xnx wrote:
| Hard to know what pricing will be, but consider: - Self-
| driving vehicle wait times may be reduced to less than a
| minute as they become more common - Car ownership also
| requires the expenses of: insurance, maintenance, fuel,
| registration, and storage space - Self-driving vehicles may
| come in many shapes and sizes: suited to carrying a single
| person for a family of 6
| vikramkr wrote:
| We won't need as many of them but the ones we use will be
| almost constantly on the road, 20 cars on the road all the
| time is more traffic than 100 cars on the road 10% of the
| time and in people's garages the rest of the time
| Axien wrote:
| Why would 20 cars be constantly on the road? The cars would
| sit in parking lots, ready for a call. The actual road
| traffic, will not change. 1000 people going to work is 1000
| people going to work irrespective whether they own the car.
|
| The biggest change would be the lack of a need for parking.
| This will allow us to build more densely.
| frumper wrote:
| You'd have more cars constantly on the road because the
| smaller pool of cars has to also travel to where the
| people are. If I go from A to B and later from B to A, a
| robotaxi would also need to get to A and B when I need
| them. It really won't matter if they're in use or drove
| off to a parking lot somewhere else, that is extra
| traffic.
| bluGill wrote:
| Wait, are there 1000 people going to work, and then the
| car parking outside of work? Or are those cars leaving
| where the people work to go elsewhere? the later creates
| more cars on the road. Sure those 1000 cars can go
| somewhere to park - but now we can't build much denser as
| we still need parking for the cars. Maybe we can move the
| cars out a bit for more density where people work, but
| then we need roads to get those cars back out.
| xnx wrote:
| Traffic and travel time is a much smaller concern when you
| can be watching Netflix instead of making sure you don't
| hit, or get hit by anyone.
| bluGill wrote:
| Traffic and travel time are still a concern: Will I get
| to work in time for my shift? When I get home how much
| time will I have for dinner before [whatever you have
| planned that night]. When do I need to get into this car
| to make it to [whatever event]
|
| If you are a single person working a flexible schedule
| (no mandatory meetings), with no other activities planned
| traffic and travel time are not a big deal. However if
| you have any life at all you will care about traffic and
| travel time because you have places to be. Watching
| netflix is not your goal it is how you kill time that you
| would prefer to do something else.
| ipdashc wrote:
| Likewise. I would really love it if robotaxis worked out and
| - crucially - were cheap, because I think it could feasibly
| increase transit usage, not decrease it. It solves the last
| mile problem in an elegant way. Nobody said you needed to
| take the taxi all the way to your destination. You could hop
| on a regional train or light rail, have a robotaxi near-
| perfectly timed (if we assume the train runs on time...) to
| pick you up at your destination stop, and ride it to your
| final destination. Same in reverse. No waiting for a bus to
| transfer to, no riding the bus slowly stop by stop, no
| walking from the bus stop to your final destination, etc.
|
| I'm as much of a transit advocate as the next guy, but I
| think a lot of people blind themselves to how annoying the
| last mile problem is for a lot of destinations anywhere
| outside of urban cores. There aren't going to be train
| stations built at every possible origin point and destination
| point, and even if there's a robust bus network, transfers,
| slow speed/frequent stopping, and the walk to/from your
| destination/origin are pretty damn annoying. They're not the
| end of the world by any means, to be clear, (I use buses
| too!) but it's just, if I have a car, why wouldn't I just
| drive?
|
| Taxis have the potential to solve that in a great way. But I
| (...and probably most people?) don't currently use them for
| that purpose since they're way too expensive. As they should
| be, it's a whole human being tending to your transport
| personally for twenty minutes or more. If robotaxis can lower
| the price, it'd be great, but I don't know how confident I am
| on that happening. The equipment is presumably expensive, the
| car itself is expensive (though EVs do have much lower
| maintenance costs), the R&D is expensive. We'll see. Exciting
| times!
| jessriedel wrote:
| I don't know why you think Cruise isn't on track. Their numbers
| are also good, although probably not as good as Waymo, but they
| are also _much_ younger than Waymo. Cruise is being punished by
| the state of California right now because they tried to cover
| up their vehicle 's worsening of a particular human-caused
| accident, not because of some problem with their overall
| numbers.
|
| EDIT: If you disagree, please link to the quantitative data
| that suggests Cruise isn't on track.
| flutas wrote:
| Another aspect to Cruise (and potentially waymo, but it
| hasn't been publicly stated) is that they claim thousands of
| miles per disengagement...when on average their cars needed
| remote assistance every 4-5 miles[0]. Waymo does the same
| thing, but the numbers just aren't publicly known.
|
| IMO stuff like this is going to lead the public to trust it
| less, since they're gaming numbers as hard as possible.
|
| [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-
| robotaxis-re...
| jessriedel wrote:
| You're comparing apples to oranges. Disengagements means
| there is a safety driver present that takes over to prevent
| a dangerous situation. The car requesting remote
| assistance, which occurs when there is _not_ a safety
| driver, is an inconvenience and expense but does _not_ mean
| there is a dangerous situation. (Of the 22 Cruise rides I
| took, it happened 3 times, and at no point was there
| danger.) It just means the car is confused. Conflating
| these things and accusing Cruise of deception is itself
| being dishonest (even though Cruise has _actually_ been
| dishonest on many occasions!).
|
| The whole game plan is have a bank of human operators who
| prove remote assistance at initially high rates which is
| then driven lower over time as the edge cases are ironed
| out iteratively. The fact that Cruise is only using one
| human remote assistant to manage ~15 rides, as mentioned in
| the article you link, tells us that the rate of remote
| assistance is already so low that it will be a very modest
| expense. For more, see the comment from Cruise's CEO:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
| flutas wrote:
| > Disengagements means there is a safety driver present
| that takes over to prevent a dangerous situation.
|
| California, at least, cites a disengagement as "whether
| because of technology failure or situations requiring the
| test driver/operator to take manual control of the
| vehicle to operate safely."[0]
|
| Would a car being confused and not being able to proceed
| without input be a disengagement by that definition? I
| think so, based off of "technology failure", but it's not
| reported as that.
|
| > It just means the car is confused. Conflating these
| things and accusing Cruise of deception is itself being
| dishonest.
|
| When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is a
| safety issue by itself, as it can lead to emergency
| services not being able to properly respond and killing
| someone[1].
|
| The fact people are trying to downplay this as "nothing"
| is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of vehicles
| get confused, they all stall and it results in gridlock
| and frustration.[2]
|
| [0]: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-
| services/auto...
|
| [1]: https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/01/person-dies-
| cruise-robotax...
|
| [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/07/0
| 8/cruise...
| jessriedel wrote:
| > California, at least, cites a disengagement as "whether
| because of technology failure or situations requiring the
| test driver/operator to take manual control of the
| vehicle to operate safely.
|
| At your Ref. [0], I just opened up the CSV titled "2022
| Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports (CSV)" under the
| header "2022 Disengagement reports". Under the column
| "Driver present (yes or no)", every single entry said
| "yes".
|
| > When a car is confused what happens? It stops. That is
| a safety issue by itself
|
| No, the car pulls over, just as it and every other taxi
| does when picking people up or dropping them off. It does
| not just stop in the middle of an intersection. I had 3
| of these events in 22 trips, which means the number of
| times the car pulled over was overwhelmingly dominated by
| normal pick-up and drop-off, not confusion.
|
| > as it can lead to emergency services not being able to
| properly respond and killing someone[1]
|
| This article is deceptive, and you're either being
| deceived or are furthering it. An ambulance being delayed
| for seconds or minutes by human-driven cars in the road
| happens _all the time_. It is a constant occurrence. "90
| seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the
| stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene" means that
| _at worst_ the ambulance was delayed by 60 seconds
| because stretchers don 't teleport instantly into
| ambulances. The article does not causally attribute the
| death to the delay because that is extremely unlikely.
| It's not how emergency medicine works. This is just a
| classic case of fear mongering. ("Ambulance has to take
| detour around construction. Patient died. Therefore,
| construction caused death." No.)
|
| This of course doesn't mean that delaying ambulances
| unnecessarily by even a second should go without
| punishment/fine. It's avoidable and should be fixed. But
| it's wrong to think this doesn't happen with humans, and
| its slander to suggest the delay probably caused a death
| in this instance.
|
| > The fact people are trying to downplay this as
| "nothing" is shocking imo. What happens when a fleet of
| vehicles get confused, they all stall and it results in
| gridlock and frustration.[2]
|
| Be more quantitative.
| high_derivative wrote:
| For one, Cruise has essentially disintegrated over the past
| few months? All key execs left
| https://fortune.com/2023/12/13/general-motors-cruise-
| executi..., massive layoffs, founders left.
|
| Cruise is done.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Happy to bet on this (and indeed I have, by buying GM
| stock). Cruise is definitely dealing with a huge, self-
| inflected PR disaster here. But all signs I have seen is
| that their tech is very advanced (although, as previously
| noted, probably a bit behind Waymo). Cruise and Waymo are
| heads and shoulders above their competitors, and there
| won't be only one winner (if for no other reason than the
| threat of anti-trust), so Cruise is likely to succeed.
|
| Again, if you have data that shows Cruise is behind Waymo
| by _a lot_ , or is behind any other company, please link
| it.
| high_derivative wrote:
| Could be a good bet, very asymmetric. The question to me
| is if the execs are leaving because they _know_ Cruise
| doesn 't have it technically and the jig is up, or if
| it's really more temporary. Hard to know from the
| outside. It's also hard to translate Cruise's much worse
| human-intervention numbers (vs Waymo) into a quantative
| measure of 'behindness' in terms of how difficult it is
| to catch up.
|
| That's why it could be a good bet. Or not.
| jessriedel wrote:
| The event precipitating executives leaving related to the
| single accident and the deceptive behavior by Cruise
| surrounding it. To my knowledge, the data shows the tech
| is good (at least as safe as human drivers) and rapidly
| improving. But I agree it's hard to know from the
| outside, and that the sensibleness of the bet definitely
| depends on the fact that the potential upside is so
| massive.
| ericpauley wrote:
| As others have noted, autonomous vehicles may actually lead to
| _less_ car use. Currently, many people must own cars for
| certain use cases. Because of this, for any given trip the
| decision to take car vs. other means is based on the _marginal_
| cost of car usage. In contrast, if people no longer need to own
| cars because of autonomous taxis, the decision of car vs. other
| reflects the _ammortized_ cost of car use, which will be far
| higher than the marginal cost. Put another way, there are
| plenty of trips being taken by car now simply because people
| have a car for other reasons, but if they didn 't own a car
| they'd far sooner take another option vs. renting/Uber/Waymo.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any
| different than the existence of taxis.
|
| The existence of taxis is (obviously) not enough to curb car
| usage growth.
|
| EDIT: Some specificity: How would robotaxis replace commuting
| for millions of people in a way that reduces car rides? The
| taxi has to move _at least_ from the storage to the rider
| pickup to the rider dropoff. Without _sharing_ , that's
| actually _more_ miles and the same number of cars.
|
| Instead, if it picks up two people per day, that's _more_
| miles, _fewer_ cars _in existence_ (since both riders dont
| need a car), but the _same_ number of car _trips_ (plus the
| to /from storage).
|
| With taxis (robotic or otherwise) the number of miles driven
| is just going _up_ unless people change their lifestyle. That
| doesn 't do anything to curb care useage.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It's a lot harder to artificially constrain autonomous
| taxis with taxi medallions.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I think I did the monthly costs to do short commutes with
| just uber or taxis and it is easily in the high hundreds or
| low thousands a month (for me, doing a 20ish minute commute
| each way)
|
| If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's
| lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or
| roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or
| trips.
|
| You factor in intelligent ride sharing and you could halve
| the number of cars on the road most days.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > If it ended up being in the low hundreds, well, that's
| lower than a lot of people's car payments. Couples or
| roommates could share a car for non commuting purposes or
| trips.
|
| So the leap here is based on "Autonomous taxi companies
| will charge less per ride than rideshare"?
|
| perhaps.
| acdha wrote:
| Is it really the case that those charges are high because
| the drivers are getting paid so much, or because the
| vehicles and things like deadheading are expensive?
| Uber's been driving driver compensation down for years
| but there's only so much room for further reductions and
| it's not like the hardware or support for self-driving
| systems is free.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| yeah, I'm not familiar on the economics of it, and I'm
| not saying you should buy stock in autonomous vehicle
| companies. This was more of musing that in _theory_ , if
| the economics of ride sharing are low enough, it could
| compete with people buying or leasing cars.
| tomComb wrote:
| Once there is adequate competition, autonomous taxis should
| be much cheaper.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This can be said for taxis as well, though, right? What's
| the difference?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Uber tries that, but it turns out in many places you
| can't offer human-driven taxis much cheaper once you put
| them on equal footing regarding insurance and other
| relevant regulations and stop running the service at a
| loss.
| tyre wrote:
| No need to pay a human and fewer total cars because they
| can operate mostly 24hr/day
| bonton89 wrote:
| Most traffic occurs during the morning and evening
| commute, you'll need roughly the same number of vehicles
| for those surges unless those norms change as well.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Can't taxis already operate 24hrs a day? Just rotate out
| the drivers.
| bluGill wrote:
| They can, but nobody wants a ride except drunks. Which is
| one reason why taxis look so bad: when a significant
| portion of your clients are drunk (throwing up in the
| back, peeing on the seats and all the other things they
| do) you don't want a nice car. Nice taxis don't work
| those shifts. If there is a big shared car market (I
| doubt it) you will see cars for different times of the
| day as a profile for potential drunk rider.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Except that our experience shows that over time
| competition decreases and things like regulatory capture
| happen so it becomes harder for anyone small to enter
| into competition and then prices get hiked up.
|
| And the cars and autonomous driving software itself is
| becoming more expensive and more subscription-based over
| time so those rents are going to have to be passed on to
| the consumer. Large autonomous taxi services may be able
| to strike better deals or even build their own
| software/vehicles if they're big enough, but you're not
| going to be able to compete with them effectively by
| purchasing a Tesla (and presumably consumer prices will
| rise as there's less individual-owned vehicles and
| companies go seeking after only the highest margins and
| abandon the toyota-corolla market to the robotaxi
| corporations).
| hervature wrote:
| Here are a couple of possibilities. Working aged person
| sends their car to their elderly parent's place so that
| they can use the vehicle to do their groceries. Families
| with kids in various activities can get the car to deliver
| and pickup all the kids at the appropriate times without
| needing multiple vehicles if the parents need to accompany
| some of the children. Car pooling becomes more acceptable
| because you can sleep during the detours to pick people up.
|
| In reality, I don't think it is useful to try to enumerate
| these small immediate changes that are distinct from the
| availability of taxis. The long term cultural shift of
| having autonomous vehicles may lead people to fundamentally
| share vehicles in a different way. This may lead to a
| situation where fewer vehicles are driving more miles.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Car pooling becomes more acceptable because you can
| sleep during the detours to pick people up.
|
| Only if it is always picking the same people up.
| Otherwise this is a big negative. People often need to
| arrive someplace on time. If my car had decided to take a
| detour to pick someone else up and made me late for my
| early meeting I'd be mad. Car pools work - to the extent
| they do - because it is always the same people who need
| to arrive at the same time.
| ghaff wrote:
| There seems to be an implicit assumption in a lot of cases
| that robo-taxis will drastically slash the price of taxis
| relative to today. _Maybe_ cut the prices by 50% at best?
| That 's about the delta between me driving my own car
| versus getting an Uber into the city. It's enough to get me
| to drive but is certainly not in too cheap to meter
| territory. And being able to have the vehicle I want with
| various stuff stored in it today is useful as well.
| kthartic wrote:
| > I do not see how the existence of autonomous taxis is any
| different than the existence of taxis.
|
| Cost. The cost of an Uber is way too much for daily travel
| (vs owning your own car or public transport).
|
| A human-driven taxi needs to pay the driver's salary within
| an 8 hour shift. An autonomous taxi can run (almost) 24/7,
| 365 days a year. Which do you think will be the cheaper
| fare?
|
| Another scenario is someone simply renting out their own
| car as an autonomous taxi whenever they aren't using it
| themselves (which is most of the time). Then it'll always
| be cheaper than current-day taxis because it's just a low-
| effort bonus source of income to the car owner.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think the difference in cost between a maybe minimum
| wage driver and a computer is far less than maybe people
| assume.
|
| And, for a car driven any reasonable amount, most of the
| cost is in the mileage.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Which do you think will be the cheaper fare?
|
| Neither, any savings will trickle up to the investors.
| The price of robotaxis is going to be just below the
| limit where it would make sense to own a car.
| bluGill wrote:
| An autonomous taxi isn't going to make many more trips
| per day. Every hear of "rush hour?" Turns out most people
| are moving around the city at the same time of the day,
| then much less trips in the other parts of the day.
| (except lunch hour when again all the same people are
| going to lunch). In the middle of the day the trips
| people make tend to be different (more likely shopping or
| delivery: different car type than commuting).
|
| I think most people will try the taxi, but if you already
| own a car (that is transit doesn't make sense for most
| trips) you will discover it isn't much cheaper than
| owning your own car, and your own car is waiting outside
| when you want to go (one big advantage of owning a car
| over transit is the car is ready when you want to go
| instead of having to call or hope one is waiting - if
| cars need to wait outside your office all day in case
| your kid gets sick that increases costs). Instead you can
| just buy a self driving car and then leave your things in
| the car if you go shopping over lunch - something you
| cannot do with a shared car.
| icambron wrote:
| The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be
| much lower than taxis, because there are no labor costs. If
| you have to get to work every day, taking a taxi (if you
| can even find one) is much more expensive than buying a car
| and amortizing the cost across its lifetime. As the price
| of autonomous taxis fall, that will reverse.
|
| That doesn't mean I agree with the GP's point about it
| lowering car usage overall. The reduced cost of auto taxies
| also pushes against your reluctance to take one, though
| perhaps not all the way to "use my car whenever I leave the
| house" levels. I also think that once people begin
| replacing their cars with autonomous taxis, they'll sign up
| for all kinds of taxi subscriptions that will further
| reduce that reluctance. After all, driving your car now
| isn't completely free: it still costs you gas money, plus
| the hassle of actually driving it. And other forms of
| transportation aren't free either. So the bar here isn't 0.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is fair. I was unclear about the distinction between
| fewer cars (supported perhaps by cheap taxis - robotic or
| otherwise), and car useage (not supported by cheap taxis
| of any kind).
| acbullen wrote:
| Once human-driven alternatives (eg. rideshare, taxis) are
| out-competed by autonomous taxis, what would be the
| incentive to keep those prices low? Especially if Waymo
| is the one service with suitably performant autonomous
| vehicles
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Exactly. People imagine some sort of future SciFi
| benevolence from PCs that is not going to happen.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| > The idea is that the cost of autonomous car use will be
| much lower than taxis
|
| I see this all the time and I just do not believe it is
| true. Uber/Lyft/etc undercut taxis for users to take
| market share, and have drastically raised prices to
| become marginally profitable.
|
| Autonomous cars are more expensive, and the labor in non-
| autonomous cars is not the majority of the costs. In NYC,
| a 1hr Uber could easily cost $100 against a minimum wage
| of $15.
|
| The idea that a taxi trip becoming cheaper than a car
| owners marginal car trip would require dramatic dropping
| of taxi prices. Even halving is not really going to do
| it, and I don't think removing the driver even halves the
| costs.
|
| The autonomous taxi boosters also seem to overlook what
| happens to unattended, unmonitored public infrastructure
| in urban areas of this country. The reason I stopped
| using Zipcar in NYC was because they were typically
| trashed inside by the previous drivers. Now imagine an
| autonomous taxi that gets turned over 10x as often. Good
| luck.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| People will very likely also be willing to spend much more
| time in cars if they don't have to actively drive. E.g. you
| have a 2 hour commute but you can play on your steam deck the
| whole time, or you can travel by sleeping in your car while
| it drives 8 hours.
|
| To the extent that self driving taxi services are cheaper
| than human driven taxi services, they will also increase use
| of taxi services.
|
| There's no reason to assume that on the balance people will
| end up driving less as a result of a technology that makes
| driving significantly more convenient simply because it might
| make taxi services somewhat cheaper and therefore potentially
| might make it easier to not own a car and encourage people to
| use other modes of transportation for some trips.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Well, sleeping is generally done when demand for cars is
| extremely low. And a lot of people can't sleep in cars even
| when they are a passenger. It's hard to imagine that
| becoming common enough, even at very low prices, to add to
| the number of cars on the road.
|
| While I'd certainly prefer to watch Netflix than actively
| drive, I've still got stuff I need/want to do that I can't
| in a car even as a passenger. And it's just not comfortable
| for long periods of time. A lot of people get motion
| sickness staring at a screen in a moving car. Etc.
|
| A lot of people own pickups just because they occasionally
| want to tow something or move something large. A lot of
| people own second cars for occasional use. These might
| become rentals instead when it can affordably just show up
| at my door in a half hour.
|
| There's no way to tell how this plays out. There will be
| some amount of induced demand, there will be some amount of
| reduction in use. One never knows which will be bigger.
|
| What I do know is traffic deaths kill over 40,000 Americans
| a year, and driverless cars could potentially get that to 0
| or near it, whereas human drivers cannot. I do know we can
| electrify cars and power them all with renewable energy,
| not immediately of course, and remove many of the
| environmental concerns. We can enhance mobility for the
| elderly and children and mentally disabled who can't drive.
|
| There's a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that has
| gotten people worried about this, but I look forward to a
| driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean, safe, and
| available to all.
| acdha wrote:
| > There's a strange amount of anti-car propaganda that
| has gotten people worried about this, but I look forward
| to a driverless future in which cars are cheap, clean,
| safe, and available to all.
|
| It's not propaganda but jumbled concerns which are often
| poorly expressed. I think the strongest arguments are:
|
| 1. Self-driving cars don't change pollution - even EVs
| are better for local air quality but still cause massive
| carbon emissions and unchanged or worse tire
| particulates, etc. - and may even make it worse locally
| with the extra mileage from taxi fleets.
|
| 2. Self-driving cars only lightly improve congestion, and
| then only to the extent that they can coordinate and you
| can ban non-AI drivers from certain chokepoints at
| certain times. The form factor unavoidably needs far more
| space per passenger than anything else.
|
| 3. Self-driving cars don't really help with affordability
| - even if the current prices come closer to parity,
| that's a financial stress for many people (e.g. in the
| region where I live, the average family spends as much on
| vehicles as they do food).
|
| 4. Self-driving safety needs a different relationship
| with the manufacturer. There are many areas where they
| can be safer but failures can also be correlated so we
| really need companies to share liability and have
| rigorous safety oversight.
|
| As a pedestrian, I'm fairly bullish on the concept given
| how dangerous the average driver is now compared to 20
| years ago but I worry that a lot of politicians are going
| to ignore the other issues because those require hard
| choices whereas it's so compatible with American culture
| to say you can solve major problems by making an
| expensive purchase. These shouldn't be opposing issues,
| of course, and I'd really like to combine them because
| autonomous vehicles should soon, if not already, be much
| better about following speed limits, staying out of bus
| lanes, etc. Making advanced automatic braking a
| requirement to enter a city could save thousands of lives
| every year.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda
| spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies
| and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for
| the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an
| area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit
| significantly less CO2 per mile driven. Like 2-4x
| depending on a wide range of factors. And most new power
| generation being built in the US is now renewables and if
| anything, we lag much of the world. It's over 80%.
| (Luckily it's easy to tell the near future in this regard
| because utility info is all public and planned out years
| in advance due to permitting, purchasing, etc. so there
| are functionally no currently unplanned power plants
| being built in 2024 or even until 2027 or 2028 or so.)
| This is because it's just cheaper now, and the economics
| of wind/solar get better every year as generation costs
| fall and fossil fuel prices rise. Technology usually gets
| cheaper, fossil fuels usually get more expensive, and
| both of these seem to be true in this case. You are
| correct about particulates, but it's basically
| insigificant compared to carbon emissions, and probably
| even offset by lack of motor oil or various other fluids
| that spill and need produced and then to be disposed of,
| time the car has to drive in for service, etc. Any sane
| person would happily trade a 50-80% reduction in
| lifecycle CO2 emissions per car for a 25% increase in
| tire particulate matter in the environment. It's only
| propaganda that makes people mention this, even if it's
| true, because it's just a non-factor.
|
| I had half a mind to write a long treatise on why I think
| we'll only see significant EV adoption if/when cars
| become driverless, but I'll save it and just go with
| this. Someone I know was killed last week in a hit and
| run. She got in a minor car accident, got out to check on
| it, and a third driver hit her and took off.
|
| When it comes to affordability, economists generally set
| the economic value of an average American life at ~$10
| million, and 40,000 people die from traffic deaths every
| year. Even if we just look at the numbers, Americans buy
| about 3 million cars a year. So 40,000 * $10 million
| divided by 3 million is a savings of over $133k per car,
| which is far in excess of the average car's lifetime
| cost. Even a 50% reduction in deaths, which for all I
| know currently existing driverless cars could achieve,
| would be the same as making all cars free in terms of
| average cost.
|
| And even if driverless cars are a total push in every
| other respect (and I think they'll be much better) 40,000
| families a year (and I assume globally, at least 5x that)
| not losing a wife and mother that way is more than worth
| whatever we have to do to make it happen.
|
| Stay safe.
| acdha wrote:
| > The EV pollution component of this is 100% propaganda
| spread by legacy auto makers and fossil fuel companies
| and is blatantly false. They are substantially better for
| the environment and the delta is growing too. Even in an
| area where energy is generated by fossil fuels, EVs emit
| significantly less CO2 per mile driven.
|
| That's not the argument being made. Everyone knows they
| pollute less per mile - but unfortunately the
| manufacturing is roughly half of the lifetime pollution
| from a vehicle.
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/27/ucs-study-shows-
| lifetim...
|
| https://www.iea.org/data-and-
| statistics/charts/comparative-l...
|
| This matters especially because consumers have been
| getting heavily marketed into getting massive trucks and
| SUVs, where the sheer size of the vehicle means the
| lifetime emissions are greater than a small ICE because
| the lack of tailpipe emissions can't make up for that
| even if it's powered entirely off of renewables.
|
| That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be electrifying the
| vehicle fleet quickly but it's buying time on the trip to
| zero emissions, not a solution. Buses and e-bikes get us
| much further because they don't suffer from emissions the
| inherent inefficiency of automobiles.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Buses and e-bikes get us much further because they don't
| suffer from emissions the inherent inefficiency of
| automobiles.
|
| It's a free country: people are free to choose to use
| autonomous cars over ebikes and buses and why wouldn't
| they? The emissions profile of a personal electric car
| being unaffordable[0] doesn't pass the sniff test.
|
| [0]Fair economic taxation of externalities - considering
| current status quo.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Those comments always remind me how insular this
| community is. Go to Cleveland, or Phoenix, or Houston, or
| literally any city that isn't in the top five in density,
| and try getting around by bus or bike and tell me how you
| like your life.
|
| I don't particularly love cars or anything, and would be
| really happy to not have to have one, but there's no way
| I'm going to try to rely on buses or bikes. I value my
| time, too much for buses and my life, and not being
| either frozen or covered in sweat too much for any sort
| of bike.
|
| A car gets you from point A to point B quickly, reliably,
| comfortably, and with cargo. Nothing else does that, and
| we are willing to spend a significant portion of our
| income for it.
| acdha wrote:
| We're only talking about pollution here - the problem is
| that multi-ton heavy machinery has a much bigger
| footprint than any other common option for moving a
| person around. It's not a "free country" debate, just
| unavoidable physics: using 4-6K lbs of machine to move
| 200lbs of person is going to require a lot more energy
| than a 20lbs bicycle or having that person share a bus
| with 50 other people.
|
| I think taxing carbon would be a great way to encourage
| people to reconsider how they travel, and would expect
| many people to pick things like those small EVs for urban
| usage if that became common.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Both of those links say EVs still have substantially low
| carbon emissions.
|
| Studies are all over the map but the ones that put it
| anywhere near 50% are all from China.
| ghaff wrote:
| Speaking for myself, I would _absolutely_ "drive" more
| miles if my car were autonomous. I'd take the hour+ trip
| into the city far more if I didn't have to drive or go on
| the two hour+ drive to the mountains for a day hike. Even
| if there are fewer cars (which is mostly about the
| economics) there will absolutely be more car-miles with
| autonomous systems.
| worik wrote:
| It would probably be much more expensive
|
| If all you pay is the marginal cost then those that live
| an hour away will pay six times those that live ten
| minutes away
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm assuming I own the vehicle. Whether there's a driver
| or a computer, I also assume that routine 2-4 hour round
| trips in a taxi of some form aren't going to be viable
| for most people.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Yeah, I was offered tickets to a bowl game that's about
| three hours away - but it won't end until around 11 pm,
| and I have to be at work at 6:30 am the next day.
|
| No way I can do that and be functional the next day, but
| if the car could drive itself, I'd probably be going.
| pornel wrote:
| This is already a reality with the fully electric self-
| driving tech we have now: trains. And no, people still
| dislike long commutes, even if they can play steam deck on
| the train.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| The problem is that (in the US) an overwhelming majority of
| car journeys (and traffic) occur during rush hour. And it's
| difficult to see how autonomous vehicles could reduce the
| amount of cars used during rush hour. Rush hour traffic
| involves a lot of vehicles moving to similar destinations,
| during the same time window. While some cars could certainly
| be used for multiple journeys during the same rush hour, most
| cars would likely sit in parking garages all day, just like
| today.
| hasty_pudding wrote:
| This. Uber is very expensive because a human has to get paid.
| If people could get a car "subscription" for X number of
| dollars a month and forgo cost of gas, maintenance,
| insurance, and all the other headaches meanwhile,a company
| could leverage economies of scale to do all of this I think
| people would move away from a private car.
|
| This would also reduce the cost on doordash type services so
| if instead of paying an extra $10 for your
| food/groceries/everyhing to be delivered you paid orders of
| magnitude less.
|
| This might reduce the traffic on the road.
|
| The pessimist in me makes me think once they got sufficient
| market share price would go back up and wed be worse off than
| before lol.
| dns_snek wrote:
| The only way to reduce traffic without changing your
| routine is by packing more people in less space, i.e.
| public transit.
| baron816 wrote:
| Such a bad take
|
| > even more cars on the streets
|
| You don't know that. I could make a prediction that it would
| lead to fewer cars on the street. Fewer parked cars especially.
|
| > less investment into better modes of transport
|
| I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I don't
| think it's fair to call them "better". They're hugely expensive
| and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less accessible.
|
| > traffic will get a lot worse once people are ok with sitting
| in bad traffic
|
| You also don't know that traffic will get worse. Traffic could
| potentially get much better with better drivers. But also, if
| people are ok with it, then who cares?
| epolanski wrote:
| I think it's absolutely fair to call public transport
| "better" for society.
|
| Every single time scientists and city planners are called to
| answer "how we make the city more livable and reduce traffic"
| the answer is always better public transport (more trains
| especially).
|
| The only part I could resonate with you is that we don't know
| whether SDC could lead to less cars. That's true if people
| will use more self driving taxis over personal cars.
| ImPleadThe5th wrote:
| > I assume you mean subways, buses, and trams here. But I
| don't think it's fair to call them "better". They're hugely
| expensive and can be disruptive in many ways, are much less
| accessible.
|
| Now this is a bad take. Public transit is _always_ better
| than individual vehicles when we are talking about a
| metropolitan area. The amount of resources, land, and
| pedestrian freedom that is eaten up for roads is insane.
| Imagine how many people can fit in a subway, and then expand
| that to each of them individually being in a car on the road.
|
| Public transit is expensive, but so are new highways, highway
| maintenance, road accidents, speed enforcement... Etc. The
| worst thing is that many times people who don't own cars pay
| for those services they won't use. All the while public
| transit is getting it's funding cut.
|
| I think the original comment is a little off in that more
| autonomous drivers does not directly lead to less public
| transit. But it is a concern that these profit/investor
| driven companies will be competing with public transportation
| and this has a lot of implications.
| baron816 wrote:
| I will definitely agree that a transportation system based
| off public transit is much better than what we have now.
| The advantage you get with a 100% AV based system is that
| you can get coverage that you'll never get with public
| transit. NYC, which has a great system, still has lots of
| parts of the city which you can't really get to without
| calling a car or walking a long way. The point-to-point
| routing should not be discounted either. Getting in a car
| and going directly to your destination rather than trying
| to make a bunch of connection (and dealing with kids or
| purchased items or a wheelchair) makes a big difference for
| a lot of people.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I foresee more people will live in vehicles.
|
| It's far cheaper to live in an autonomous motorhome that drives
| around all day and happens to arrive at work just as you need
| to be there each morning than to rent an apartment in San
| Francisco. Driving about is probably cheaper than paying for
| parking too, especially if you deliberately head for the
| busiest traffic.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Especially when you can automate switching rented batteries
| instead of waiting to charge them. Drive 4 hours out in a
| random direction, then 4 hours back for work, with nary a
| minute of downtime
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This is already happening if you pay attention to all the
| vans and even cars with blacked out windows parking in your
| neighborhood, maybe even in front of your house. Stealth
| campers are very real, even if they don't stick out as much
| as meth RVs.
|
| You could already commute with cheap taxis (eg in the
| developing world). The more important thing is that people
| want to live in San Francisco, they wouldn't be happy
| commuting from some far off place in the first place. And as
| stealth campers have already figured out, not a lot of places
| available to camp in your car even 40-60 miles out, so might
| as well be where you want.
|
| But the idea that your car could just involve itself in
| traffic jams all day rather than pay for parking is
| interesting, it could also look for time limited but free
| parking and move on to somewhere else when that expired,
| which is more common outside the city. Heck, it could park at
| a shopping mall that doesn't allow walk offs...because no one
| is walking off.
| dougmwne wrote:
| The US has so much sunk cost in car centric urban design that
| all discussion of self driving cars taking investment away from
| public transit is all wasted words. It's not just the roads and
| the number of people absolutely committed to driving on them.
| It's urban design that is so sparse that we'll be locked into
| personal transit for hundreds of years. Compared to Europe
| where Romans laid down street plans thousands of years ago,
| people will still be walking around in another thousand years.
|
| Must as well have the cars in the US drive themselves so we can
| all get a nap at least.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| > the second and third order effects...
|
| You're being overly pessimistic. I can see the opposite
| occuring on each of your points.
|
| - less traffic due to more efficient driving: once automated
| driving is pervasive it's natural that cars and traffic as a
| whole will coordinate and optimise use of the road. You should
| be able to predict traffic accurately and choose the optimal
| time to travel. Car speeds will coordinate to maximise flow
| through roads. Improved public transport will increase the
| number of passengers per vehicle and reduce personal vehicles.
|
| - more investment into better modes of transport due to lowered
| costs: the cost structure of buses (and trains) lends itself to
| larger vehicles with less stops. Without having to pay someone
| to drive you can remake public transport into something that
| takes less people at a time to more places, without requiring
| expensive infrastructure. Think small automated busses that
| serve a web of points instead of routes, so people can request
| to get from A to B and the system delivers from as close to A
| and to as close to B as possible as soon as possible at the
| lowest cost.
|
| - less car ownership: most people don't want to own cars, so
| it's very likely that car ownership will drop significantly.
| With new privately and publicly owned forms of public
| transport, the need to own a car will disappear in many cases.
|
| I feel that almost all technology is positive (not sure about
| social media), since it generally gives people more choices and
| abilities. Automated cars have very few downsides.
| xnx wrote:
| More benefits:
|
| - Increase cycling and walking because the roads are much
| safer
|
| - Less noise from cars revving their engines, or being poorly
| maintained (holes in mufflers, underinflated tires, etc.)
|
| - No carjacking
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I would note a lot of research shows coordinated autonomous
| vehicles using basic control theory can dramatically improve
| traffic flow with even a small percentage of vehicles
| coordinating (I think it was around 10%). They found they all
| but eliminate most human behavior caused traffic jams (I.e.,
| most traffic except caused by emergencies or accidents). In
| fact if most vehicles are AV then it becomes more of a dynamic
| convoy model where all vehicles cooperate to maximize flow.
| This would require a much smaller road infrastructure to
| achieve the same flow as today. Rather than contributing to the
| problem autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the impact of
| transit, while maintaining individual carriage.
| akavi wrote:
| As a single anecdote, I've taken 12 Waymo rides over the past 3
| months, and I'd put them at ~90th percentile with respect to
| human Uber/Lyft drivers in terms of smoothness/quality of
| reaction to the various hazards of SF streets.
|
| (Over ~4 Cruise rides, I'd put them closer to median)
| unixhero wrote:
| Benchmark against Tesla not humans.
| ra7 wrote:
| Tesla has humans supervising when in FSD, so they're included
| here too.
| buro9 wrote:
| Tesla are free to benchmark against Waymo.
|
| Or even against humans... not as a claim that is unverified,
| but to work to verify the claim with a third party.
| liuliu wrote:
| Like others said. Waymo One in San Francisco is great. Smooth /
| confident drive. Good situation awareness (several times when it
| made unexpected action, only later I realized there is a person
| or a car it tried to avoid).
|
| Looking forward to expand its coverage to SFO, that will be a
| game-changer.
|
| Still not sure of it economics though. Its current price is on-
| par with Uber Comfort / a little bit over Uber X. How that can
| support the R&D or future capital-heavy expansion?
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| > How that can support the R&D or future capital-heavy
| expansion?
|
| I guess if it's showing enough promise to be profitable on its
| own (workout R&D and expansion costs), Google can probably
| spare a few more billions.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| People keep getting more expensive, the tech keeps getting
| cheaper, the economics will eventually work out.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I'm extremely skeptical of the economics of scaling Waymo up to
| a viable, profitable service. At least, not at a large scale.
| But the R&D that's gone into it will require a large scale
| rollout to pay off.
| mgfist wrote:
| Removing the driver frees up a lot of money to be used towards
| all of that.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I don't think the price they charge for Waymo is related almost
| at all to their operating cost. Operating cost is undoubtedly
| _much_ higher. I suspect Waymo has set fleet size based on how
| many cars they want operating for gathering the best amount of
| data and testing improvements, and then prices are set by
| demand (i.e., price that keeps the cars busy while minimizing
| wait time).
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| > Operating cost is undoubtedly much higher.
|
| There you go - I would have said their operating cost is much
| lower. Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more
| than the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
|
| Their development costs are a different story. I suspect only
| a company like Google could sustain it. But presumably it's
| one off, and if they spread it over 1 million taxi's in the
| USA it would only be a fraction of the revenue.
|
| Those development costs have an upside too. It's a moat. If
| they pull if off they will have a monopoly. The will get away
| with being able to change just under the cost of a real
| driver for years. We may well be bitching here in a decades
| time at the obscene profits alphabet is making off us, and
| yet we have no obvious way out.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > I would have said their operating cost is much lower.
| Paying the wages of the drivers for a year costs more than
| the car - even a car plus all those fancy LIDAR's.
|
| No, Cruise shared a few months ago that operating costs per
| mile is still higher than a car with a paid driver.
|
| https://gmauthority.com/blog/2023/07/gms-cruise-operating-
| co...
|
| If operating costs were below a human driver, they would be
| scaling as fast as possible to recoup the developmnent
| costs for the current level of tech, which have already
| been expended.
| xnx wrote:
| Also worth noting that Uber rides are somewhat subsidized
| by drivers' limited understanding of fuel, insurance, and
| maintenance costs.
| paxys wrote:
| The price on these rides is simply a way to control demand and
| better approximate real world use cases, not to subsidize
| operating costs. If Google can make this technology
| commercially viable there are unlimited avenues for
| monetization.
| r053bud wrote:
| Does riding in a Waymo One vehicle require a Google account?
| cowmix wrote:
| FWIW, I've used them quite a few times here in Phoenix ---
| overall a very positive experience. The Waymo car used to be too
| cautious and would take weird routes but now they drive
| appropriately aggressive and the route selection is much better.
| MBCook wrote:
| Is this meaningful?
|
| OK they have a lower crash rate compared to humans. They also
| just stop in the middle of the street when they get confused and
| do nothing until someone remotes in to drive them.
|
| I'm sure humans would do a lot better if every time they got
| unsure they just stopped and never moved again.
|
| Waymo is clearly out in front by a few hundred miles, but touting
| this seems a little disingenuous to me.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| In my experience, getting stuck in the middle of the street is
| >90% a Cruise problem and <10% Waymo.
| MBCook wrote:
| Oh I may be mixing them up. Thanks.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I wonder how much each of their Jags plus the equipment costs?
| keep320909 wrote:
| "Comparable" human benchmarks may be a bit misleading. Waymo
| drives far safer and less assertive, on turns it does not push
| itself into traffic and waits longer...
|
| It is still pretty impressive, but we should compare average
| speed and such.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Safer but slightly slower is totally fine. It's even more fine
| when there's no human attention being wasted on the act of
| driving itself.
| huytersd wrote:
| I've done two dozen trips and I can vouch for this. It seemed
| completely safe and in control, with crisp decisive moves
| throughout all those rides. I'm not sure what they're doing on
| the backend but this is it.
| superkuh wrote:
| That's great. I'm glad they're good enough to drive in the
| southwest. But Waymo cars performance in SF cannot be implicitly
| extrapolated to non-SF environments.
|
| Try the same thing in a place with winter on a normal suburban
| city road. The road edges and evolving swarm-defined lanes have
| little to do with the absolute GPS position of the unobscured
| lanes and edges. An _all_ the road makings are often obscured for
| weeks at at time (or longer). The road surface snow _looks_ just
| like the road edge snow. And it 's a semi-permanent slippery
| surface.
|
| There are a lot of challenges left in non-cherry picked regions
| before autonomous driving can be said to "outperform comparable
| human benchmarks" without this qualifier.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Obviously an announcement like this from a company with plenty on
| the line is going to be as positive. Report as is possible. That
| said, kudos to them for acknowledging several possible sources of
| bias in the writeup.
|
| However, while differing vehicle types were mentioned as a source
| of variation, there was almost no indication that this factor was
| applied to the numbers. Also, my understanding is that this
| service does limit its coverage area, so I'm curious what sort of
| impact that has on the numbers.
|
| One other interesting fact. They claim 7+ million miles on
| 700,000 trips. So the average trip is over 10 miles, which I
| found surprising, but perhaps I shouldn't since most of the data
| is probably from the Phoenix area.
| paxys wrote:
| I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against a
| somewhat comparable user group - say professional taxi drivers -
| over just a general sampling of the population. The majority of
| people are driving most of their miles during rush hour when
| chances of a crash are the highest, while Waymo cars operate all
| day/night. Plus I'm sure that first-time drivers, drunk drivers,
| people out on illegal joyrides and other such extremes drag the
| numbers down enough that saying "I'm in the top 40%" really isn't
| all that meaningful anymore.
|
| What I'm interested in knowing is how these cars drive compared
| to the average _competent_ driver in the exact same environment.
| gruez wrote:
| >I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against
| a somewhat comparable user group - say professional taxi
| drivers - over just a general sampling of the population
|
| This depends on what type of drivers waymo is displacing. If
| it's displacing mostly professional drivers, then that
| substitution would be reasonable, because the choices we have
| are either professional drivers or waymo. However, if it's
| displacing "normal" drivers, including "first-time drivers,
| drunk drivers", then the substitution wouldn't be reasonable
| because banning waymo would mean those rides would be replaced
| with "normal" drivers, not super-safe professional drivers.
| paxys wrote:
| Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the
| only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so that
| question answers itself.
|
| Even otherwise though, if at some point in the future I have
| the option of trading my car in for a fully autonomous one,
| the only thing I'm really interested in knowing is how my
| personal accident risk in getting from point A to point B
| changes compared to if I was driving myself. These benchmarks
| are meaningless in that regard. I'm not driving drunk, I'm
| not driving in bad weather conditions, I'm not being
| needlessly arrogant or reckless on the road. Can this car
| drive better than me?
| gruez wrote:
| > Well at the moment Waymo operates a taxi service, and the
| only way to use it is as a substitute for Uber/Lyft, so
| that question answers itself.
|
| but thanks to the gig economy, "professional taxi drivers"
| basically means anyone with a drivers license.
| creer wrote:
| I don't know that taxi or uber drivers are particularly safer.
| I mean drunk and joyriders sure - but that must be a tiny
| fraction of drivers. As opposed to the ultra-common "scared"
| and "distracted". The last shared drivers (including taxis) I
| have used did not seem particularly expert. They certainly did
| not seem hyper-alert (which would make sense if driving all
| day) or experienced (in the case of uber drivers).
|
| But there seems to be some stats.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/nyregion/that-wild-taxi-r...
| got "crash rates one-third lower". Still great result from
| Waymo.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >I wish all of these benchmarks pitted autonomous cars against
| a somewhat comparable user group - say professional taxi
| drivers - over just a general sampling of the population.
|
| When you say professional taxi drivers, do you mean people who
| drive for Uber/Lyft? Because that's who these companies are
| looking to replace.
| danans wrote:
| The only way this has an impact on road accident/injury/fatality
| rates at any meaningful scale is if millions of people switch
| from routine personal-car based transportation to shared
| transportation, even single-occupancy shared transportation like
| Waymo.
|
| I don't see millions running out and buying a real self-driving
| car kitted with a spinning lidar "hat" and visible radar
| transmitters sticking out everywhere, even if doing so meant
| safer roads for everyone.
|
| What people in the market actually want is what Tesla has been
| selling (however fraudulently): a car that looks/performs very
| nice and _claims_ full-self-driving capability, not a goofy
| looking car that self-drives very well in particular locations
| and use cases. Cars are about personal identity and power at
| least as much as they are about functional transportation.
|
| I'd like to be wrong about all that, and would like a future
| where swarms of electric self-driving buses that route-optimize
| based on demand pick up people very close to where they are. But
| I also realize that the reptilian brains of consumers tend to
| decide how these things eventually pan out, and not the solutions
| that are optimized for efficiency and safety.
| madars wrote:
| Why don't you see millions buying a real self-driving car? You
| can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a commute
| and buy a bigger house where land is cheap. I doubt there are
| fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't be made more appealing
| for people who value aesthetics above saving a literal hour+
| every day.
| danans wrote:
| > You can work (or read or watch movies or whatever) during a
| commute and buy a bigger house where land is cheap > saving a
| literal hour+ every day.
|
| Hyper-commuting isn't really an aspiration for most people.
| The aspiration is usually either having the big house where
| land is expensive, or having the even bigger house where land
| is cheap plus not having to commute. More abstractly, there
| are 2 location luxuries: 1) proximity to opportunity, and 2)
| not needing the proximity to opportunity because you are
| wealthy enough not to care.
|
| Furthermore, time spent in a car isn't time spent with family
| - which is presumably most peoples' reason for wanting a big
| house. Being stuck in a self-driving car for hours commuting
| doesn't give you that kind of time back.
|
| > I doubt there are fundamental reasons why sensors couldn't
| be made more appealing for people who value aesthetics
|
| My take is that making them more appealing means making them
| nearly invisible. To the best of my knowledge, in the case of
| lasers and other visible-light spectrum sensors, making them
| more invisible inhibits their function. That's probably a big
| reason Tesla dismissed lidar.
|
| Also, if there's one thing Elon has taught us, it's that you
| sell more people on new car ideas by appealing to their base
| instincts, not their higher selves.
| xnx wrote:
| > Being stuck in a self-driving car for hours commuting
| doesn't give you that kind of time back.
|
| It can. Most would probably prefer a 1 hour self-driving
| commute to a 30 minute manually-driven commute. That hour
| of self-driving time can be used for chores (paying taxes,
| calling the plumber, etc.) that might otherwise have to be
| done during family time.
| gotstad wrote:
| Designing a prototype car for trials vs mass production are two
| different things entirely. Those lidar sensors will become far
| less intrusive once a car is designed for mass production.
|
| Most likely, the existing Waymo cars have their LiDAR sensors
| equipped like that because they need to be maintained and
| swapped at a regular basis.
|
| I think the value proposition is more than enough for mass
| adoption, once people realize they can work and commute at the
| same time.
| jessriedel wrote:
| It will start in cities with people declining to purchase new
| cars since they can just take a cheap self-driving car
| everywhere. It's true that at sufficiently low population
| density it would not makes sense to rely on a taxi service even
| if most people were using it, but I think that is only in very
| rural areas. 90% of the Americans live in an region where, if
| they all used a self-driving taxi service, the experience would
| be better than everyone owning a car. The hard economic
| benefits of not having to worry about maintenance, parking, or
| the up-front capital costs at purchase (huge!) will steam roll
| the romantic aspects of owning a personal car.
| danans wrote:
| > It will start in cities with people declining to purchase
| new cars since they can just take a cheap self-driving car
| everywhere
|
| Wouldn't Uber/Lyft have already sopped up whatever demand
| exists for that? If anything Waymo is going to take that
| business away.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I'm including Uber and Lyft in "taxi", i.e., driving
| service on demand. Replacing a personal car with Uber and
| Lyft is too expensive for most people, and the basic
| economic reason is that a human driver must be paid. But in
| a few years self-driving taxis will be cheaper than taxis
| with human drivers. At that point, a larger and larger
| share of the population will stop buying cars and will just
| take self-driving taxis.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Pretty neat! Worth keeping in mind though that a lot of that data
| came from Phoenix, a city that only gets 8 inches of rain a year
| and has fairly pristine, well-marked roads to match. In a way,
| Phoenix is the perfect initial testing ground for self-driving
| cars before you put them in an environment that more closely
| resembles the typical US city.
|
| But a lot of that data also seems to come from San Francisco, so
| I have to admit I'm impressed.
| Powdering7082 wrote:
| They break it down by SF & also attempt to control for location
| hosh wrote:
| Phoenix also has a lot of jerk drivers. There's a law here
| against displays of road rage, but it doesn't stop people from
| doing some really weird and dangerous stuff just to show their
| displeasure.
|
| (In constrast to say, Albuquerque. Drivers are a lot nicer and
| polite. They just have traffic signals that are confusing, and
| the regulations on signs and lines placement sets you up for
| failure).
| Grazester wrote:
| I am surprised that law has not been challenged by someone
| stating it violates their first amendment rights.
| hosh wrote:
| Interesting, and I'll keep that in mind. I'm not sure that
| law keeps people from using other means to express their
| road rage in a more dangerous manner (for example, cutting
| in front and then slowing down is something I have
| encountered before).
| stickfigure wrote:
| The folks that get indignant about even the marginal self-driving
| cars (Cruise, Tesla) vastly overestimate the abilities of human
| drivers.
|
| Spend an hour watching this channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/@DashcamLessons
|
| If you have a strong stomach, search youtube for "brutal and
| fatal".
|
| Humans are shit drivers. Remember that when you hand the car keys
| over to your teenager.
| xnx wrote:
| My [least] favorite genre of this type of video if of snow
| pileups where drivers blindly drive 40mph on slick roads and
| whiteout conditions ... and straight into dozens of other
| vehicles.
| joshe wrote:
| A quote from Tyler Cowen I read this morning...
|
| Tyler Cowen: Uncertainty should not paralyse you. Try to do your
| best, pursue maximum expected value, and just avoid the moral
| nervousness. Be a little Straussian about it. Like here's a rule,
| on average it's a good rule, we're all gonna follow it. Bravo, go
| on to the next thing. Be a builder.
|
| Joe Walker: Get on with it?
|
| Tyler Cowen: Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're
| not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their
| own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like
| there's some brute let's be a builder' view and then in contrast
| there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue.
| It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick.
| I say be a builder.
| mergy wrote:
| As someone that has taken quite a few Waymo trips now since
| October 2023, I am continually impressed with how it handles the
| crazy here in San Francisco from odd/narrow streets, bad drivers
| doing stupid things, and overall safety with pedestrians doing
| all sorts of non-standard behaviors from crossing randomly to
| pausing at odd points in crosswalks, etc. Also, I've been in a
| bunch of situations in a Waymo where other drivers are messing
| with position to try and freak the Waymo out, and every time, it
| did a great job. I've never been in a Cruise, but I can't deny
| Waymo has been a great experience for me in SF and up around 20
| or so trips.
|
| Here is a video of Waymo going through the Broadway Tunnel in SF
| back in Oct 2023 to give you a sense of it. >>
| https://mer.gy/broadwaytunnelwaymo
| pvsteve wrote:
| When autonomous vehicles become super safe, will the size of the
| vehicles more accurately reflect how many people are in the
| vehicle? Cars that can carry 5 people when the average occupancy
| is 1.5 in the US seems wasteful just because people feel safer in
| big cars.
|
| It seems like we should have a lot more small single occupant
| vehicles that are effectively caged motorcycles, but actually
| safe.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I think this is where we get to eventually when there are no
| more human drivers and so the roads become extremely safe.
| Until then, you need a certain amount of mass to protect you
| from idiots, no matter how safe the computer is driving. Given
| that mass, adding three extra seats is little additional cost,
| and gives you additional flexibility in dispatch (reducing wait
| times). But to your point, they will probably have a "large"
| size pretty soon, a la Uber XL (although it will only come
| after the first no-steering-wheel vehicle is widely deployed).
| xnx wrote:
| Exactly. It's interesting to think about a distant future
| where Waymo vehicles are more like "people movers" and don't
| need impact resistance, seatbelts, airbags, etc. because the
| risk of collision is so low.
| acover wrote:
| Can you build a small but safe car? Mass, height, etc are key
| variables in a crash.
| hangonhn wrote:
| > this study includes all Waymo crashes, regardless of the Waymo
| vehicle's role in the crash, and with any amount of property
| damage
|
| I really like this because I think this happens a lot with human
| drivers. There are many instances where there was a potential
| crash that was avoided by me or the other drivers. I think that's
| crucial to autonomous driving. Not only should they have the
| ability to make mistake but to also compensate for other drivers'
| mistakes. It's all very good to say "we did everything we were
| supposed to" after an incident but it's even better to never have
| the incident at all. An AI that can react well to the unexpected
| would be a huge milestone.
| kazinator wrote:
| A more fair comparison would be against human drivers who are
| constantly texting about where they are and what they are doing
| and seeing, since that's what the Waymo drivers are doing.
|
| :)
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I think this is a useful and impressive study - I haven't read
| all 40 pages, neither have you :) I did do some good-faith
| skimming. Assuming Waymo didn't falsify their data (they didn't),
| this makes me feel comfortable having Waymo in SF and Phoenix. I
| think it's clearly safer than an Uber. But some caveats:
|
| - The major caveat is that Waymo is not being directly compared
| against _sober_ humans driving _lawfully._ [1] The reason why
| this caveat is so important is that technology which makes it
| impossible for humans to exceed a posted speed limit might be
| overall much safer than replacing human drivers with autonomous
| drivers. Uber isn't more dangerous than Waymo because humans are
| incompetent, it's because humans obey orders from impatient
| drivers and Waymo currently does not. This is a UI choice, not an
| AI advancement.
|
| - More specifically, _lawful_ driving is an important caveat
| because Tesla Autopilot had _two different settings for driving
| unlawfully_ , according to the users' own sense of personal risk.
| An AV manufacturer who advertises "AI-assisted speeding" will
| almost certainly find a lot of customers, even if it's under the
| table. People don't speed and run red lights because they're too
| stupid to understand why it's dangerous: they do it because
| they're reckless and selfish. AI won't stop that, only regulation
| will.
|
| - Another caveat is that Waymo was trained on human-dominated
| streets. Waymo being safer in a sea of human vehicles does not
| actually translate to Waymo being safer in a sea of Waymos. I
| think this is a low-probability risk but it's hardly a simple
| question: I believe Waymo has had issues where several AVs
| occupied the same street after an event and blocked traffic
| because they couldn't decide what to do - they were waiting on
| each other to behave like a human. But again, the risk seems like
| gridlock, not property damage or injury.
|
| - And a minor but still important caveat is that SF and Phoenix
| have modern linear grids which have been mapped to death by AV
| manufacturers. As a Boston resident I am still holding my breath
| about their performance here :)
|
| [1] Not because of anything insidious, it's just a granularity
| that both the analysis and the data struggle to capture.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Once automated cars make up a significant fraction of cars on
| the road I would expect some communication scheme to emerge to
| make them coordinate with each other, maybe even sharing
| observed positions of other road participants.
|
| There is the risk that they will misbehave or deadlock around
| each other, but also a great opportunity for them to
| communicate intent to each other at a level human drivers just
| can't do from a sound-insulated cabin.
| creer wrote:
| I would be surprised is they don't already share at the
| detailed map level. Was any published on how much the cars
| contribute to improving the map day after day (including
| temporary road closures and road work)? - but probably not
| yet directly when at the same intersection.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| My point is that it will take a lot of work to _train_ them
| to communicate with each other. They are not smart enough to
| have a scheme simply pasted in, nor are human programmers
| adept enough to hard-wire a carefully-trained AI to have this
| scheme implemented. Absent extensive retraining you 'd
| probably just have Waymos getting confused about all sorts of
| edge cases _in the communication scheme itself._
|
| I am not saying that it's doomed to fail - simulations can
| probably do most of the heavy lifting, and of course the tech
| itself will advance. I am saying it's a mistake to assume
| stuff like this is somehow a free lunch, or even "the easy
| part." It's unknowns about unknowns.
| eep_social wrote:
| I think the hardest thing about a city like Boston is going to
| be the areas where the rules of the road go out the window in
| favor of the social contract. Drop off and pick up at Logan or
| a sox game can be pretty wild. I don't think navigating Beacon
| st or Comm ave will be that big of a deal. I've spent about 8
| hours in a Waymo and I grew up driving in Massachusetts.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I am eagerly awaiting our first AV Storrowing :)
|
| The hardest thing about driving in Boston is that the streets
| are wildly non-rectilinear. Waymos obviously don't understand
| "the rules of the road," they are exhaustively trained on the
| rules of the road until they can imitate them. For
| rectilinear intersections they can transfer this training to
| a variety of different streets; not so in Boston, where you
| might have a weird three-way intersection involving oblique
| angles. I am also not sure if SF / Phoenix have many
| roundabouts. Or, near me, this horrific pair of four-way-
| intersections somehow combining into a five-way(?)
| intersection: https://www.google.com/maps/place/42%C2%B022'50
| .0%22N+71%C2%... I suspect Waymo would get badly confused
| here unless it was directly trained on this specific
| intersection.
| eep_social wrote:
| There are some odd intersections in Phoenix. And don't even
| ask about the "suicide lanes" which change from turning
| lanes to unidirectional during rush hour with the direction
| depending on time of day. AFAIU Waymo drives everything in
| their coverage area ahead of rollout so they're definitely
| "training" on oddities.
| creer wrote:
| There is plenty of stuff in SF that's brain-freeze level
| for human drivers. From rectilinear grid "improved" with a
| million specialized lane markings to plenty of vehicles
| blocking traffic short of ingenuity.
| ttfkam wrote:
| About ten years ago I made a prediction:
|
| Self-driving technology will overtake average human ability with
| regard to safety within a decade, but the biggest hurdle will be
| public acceptance. The AI will not make the same kind of mistakes
| humans make. So while the aggregate number of accidents will be
| (likely much) lower without a human at the wheel, the AI will
| make deadly mistakes that no human would make, and this will
| terrify the public. A intuitively predictable crash will always
| be scarier than one that makes no sense to our minds. The only
| way self-driving tech will ever succeed is if the AI can be
| limited to the same kinds of mistakes humans make, just fewer,
| and that's a VERY hard technical nut to crack that I do not
| believe will be solved anytime soon.
|
| That said, I still believe that the ubiquity of cars is
| inherently a problem, human operator or no. If we put more effort
| into self-driving busses and autonomous trains--which have
| regular schedules, routes, and predictable speeds--I think we
| would see much greater dividends on our investment and far fewer
| "unintuitive" errors. Our collective fixation on cars blinds us
| as a society to this option unfortunately. More cars just clog up
| the road even more, demand more parking, and otherwise monopolize
| land use that could be more productive otherwise. More
| idling/circling driverless cars adds to the blight rather than
| relieving it. We need to transport more people between points in
| higher density, not lower, and cars are the lowest density
| transportation options available.
| hasty_pudding wrote:
| We need private rich people to buy up large tracts of land and
| build techno test bed cities for this stuff.
| vikramkr wrote:
| If you're building a new city just do public transit instead
| of all this inefficient nonsense. Either way it's not a
| naturally growing city so if you're going to plan one plan
| one that makes sense
| dcow wrote:
| We could legislate around this very irrational/human fear.
| Personally I'd feel much safer if the roads were primarily
| filled with drivers that don't get emotional and are
| objectively safer. Even if a few accidents confuse me and seem
| avoidable. I think what your analysis is missing is that most
| human accidents are also 100% avoidable. Why aren't we looking
| at the incredibly dumb things humans do and asking the same
| hard questions? Why doesn't it spook us when a human doesn't
| see a red light and t-bones cross traffic? Or when a multi-car
| pileup happens because a large pickup truck with a big car
| complex is tailgating someone at 85 mph and a sudden stop is
| required?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It does spook some people, but sufficiently large portions of
| the population also like to engage in the very things that
| cause those collisions, such as using their phone or being
| distracted, driving inebriated, driving fast, tailgating,
| etc, such that most people feel okay with others being risky,
| since they are being risky too.
|
| Of course, when a collision does happen and damages have to
| be paid, the injured party will of course start advocating
| for full liability even if they previously had no issues
| engaging in the risky driving themselves. Which is why this
| is not reflected at the polls when voting for a politician
| who would promise cracking down hard on moving violations,
| with things like cameras and increased police stops.
| ttfkam wrote:
| And all because of our over reliance on cars in urban and
| suburban environments. Mass transit basically eliminates
| the need for moving violations, traffic citations, parking
| problems, cameras, and police stops. No more need for
| stroads, toll booths, etc. Our cities might actually be
| livable again. Walking and biking wouldn't feel like
| putting our lives at risk. Fewer parking lots means more
| stores and other amenities closer to where we live.
|
| It's the cars. Autonomous or not, cars are the problem.
|
| But just like health care, we keep choosing and voting for
| the absolute worst option because it's what we're used to
| and fear-mongers selling us a story about how any change
| will inevitably lead to a socialist hellscape. Fear: it's a
| hell of an addictive drug even as we witness our own
| obvious decline.
| frumper wrote:
| America is huge and its people are very spread out. Its
| cities are sprawling and low density.
|
| For what it's worth, I don't actually shop at the
| supermarket closest to my house that is within walking
| distance because they don't offer good prices.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Yes, there is much work to be done. And it will have to
| be done to move forward. We've eroded sidewalks and put
| driveways along major stroads. Parking lots often match
| or exceed the size of the businesses they serve. We've
| reached maximum density with car-centric city planning.
|
| There are some software decisions that worked well up to
| a certain point, but simply won't scale reliably to the
| current level let alone what you need for the foreseeable
| future. At some point you have to bite the bullet and
| refactor. Refactoring takes skill, and you need the right
| folks for the job, but it will get harder and more
| expensive the longer you wait. It typically doesn't have
| to be done all at once. Just fix as you go and stop
| following the older patterns. Have a plan and work toward
| the goal one step and a time. One commit at a time. One
| stroad at a time.
|
| Folks may believe in the whole "personal freedom" with a
| car, but how personal or free are you sitting in bumper
| to bumper traffic? Cars = Liberty is a pernicious lie.
| frumper wrote:
| I'm not sure what bullet we have to bite and why. I'd
| rather the personal freedom to just drive across town and
| shop. Our sidewalks are great, we have bike lanes, lots
| of parks. What we don't have here is a lack of space.
| We're surrounded by miles of farmland, as are all of the
| other cities near me.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is only so far as you are willing to drive. In
| theory I have the freedom to drive to New York city for
| my shopping, but that is a 17 hour drive (best case, not
| counting stops!), so I would never do that.
|
| Even for cities of normal size, the total distance across
| means you would not want to make it a regular event to
| shop on the other side of the city. So if we add transit,
| and increase density you can find there are more places
| you within a reasonable range for whatever activity even
| though you lost the freedom of the car.
|
| Of course if your activity isn't shopping - something a
| city excels at - but instead camping far away from other
| humans: then a car means freedom. When the activity you
| want to do is something a city excels then doing it via
| transit should mean even more ability to do it and thus
| more freedom. Of course this freedom via transit only
| works out when there is great transit and high density.
| Getting there is often difficult.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I live in a Czech city called Ostrava. You can look it up
| on Google Maps.
|
| We have excellent public transport, but it is slowly
| becoming too expensive for the municipal budget. Given
| that the city is historically not compact (there are
| either old industrial brownfields or rivers with adjacent
| floodplains that are unsafe for residential buildings),
| trams and buses need to cross kilometers of mostly
| uninhabited territory before reaching dense parts of the
| city again. Of course, that costs money in fuel or
| electricity, extra wear and tear on the vehicles, plus
| the polycentric character of the city does not allow for
| a simple network of lines meeting downtown. You need more
| of a triangle.
|
| And there is approximately nothing that can be done about
| it. The floodplains are dangerous to build in, the rust
| belt of brownfields would be too expensive to redevelop,
| the economy of the city is far from stellar and won't
| support any extensive redevelopment anywhere; we are
| already losing population, though not dramatically so.
| bluGill wrote:
| America does not have an even population distribution.
| East of the Mississippi is similar to Europe in
| population density, as is the far west coast (within ~100
| miles of the Pacific). There is a lot of land between the
| Mississippi river and the Pacific Ocean, plus Alaska that
| few people live on that brings density down. However if
| you just focus on where people live density is high
| enough.
|
| Even the sprawling suburbs are dense enough to support
| greats transit - but since they don't have great transit
| everyone drives creating a death spiral that is hard to
| break out of.
| paxys wrote:
| Here's a sensible way to make that transition - driving is
| treated as a privilege. If you are a dipshit on the road more
| than a certain number of times (driving drunk, running red
| lights, driving recklessly) then that privilege gets taken
| away, and you have to use an autonomous car. Over time the
| safety of everyone on the road goes up regardless of what
| they are driving.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| That only works in parts of the world where there is a
| viable alternative to driving. Speaking as someone who has
| lived most of their life in the rural south US, that's not
| a reality for most of the world.
| dcow wrote:
| You missed:
|
| > and you have to use an autonomous car
|
| The idea being you use this hypothetical level 5
| autonomous vehicle instead of the ones that let you be a
| dipshit.
|
| Anyway, we already revoke peoples' licenses for drunk
| driving and we do it in the areas you're referring to.
| ttfkam wrote:
| See earlier note about the public not accepting
| autonomous vehicles while they make errors humans
| consider nonsensical. The actual aggregated stats don't
| matter. The logic doesn't matter. All that matters is the
| video of a self-driving car veering off course suddenly
| and slamming into a school or bumping a pedestrian at
| high speed on video. It won't matter that no kids got
| hurt or that the pedestrian survived with minor injuries.
|
| It will _feel_ more dangerous and untrustworthy, and that
| has always been more than enough to kill a promising
| solution in this country.
|
| If we can overcome that and actually follow the numbers
| instead of our guts, we won't need most of the cars in
| the first place--autonomous or otherwise--because the
| numbers say mass transit is the better option on all
| metrics: economic, environmental, safety, land use, etc.
| Cars are at best a backfill option.
| paxys wrote:
| The general public doesn't have to accept anything
| because they still have a choice to use whatever car they
| want. It's only the drunk drivers being forced in those
| evil autonomous cars, and they would have otherwise
| killed themselves/others anyways if left on their own.
| And then over time the safety numbers, convenience and
| more will speak for themselves and convince you to
| switch.
| MBCook wrote:
| But what's the point? Why do individuals need level 5
| cars?
|
| Why not just make tons of public transit at that point
| using the level 5 tech instead and cut traffic?
| sib wrote:
| >> But what's the point? Why do individuals need level 5
| cars?
|
| Because there are places that public transit will never
| cover? I've been places in the American West that are 50+
| miles from the nearest paved road, stop sign, or
| restroom. I don't think they're getting bus or train
| service any time soon.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Ah, you're correct I did miss that. I'm not sure how I'd
| feel about a federally mandated solution like this... but
| I have to admit, it's A SOLUTION to an otherwise big
| problem.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| The problem is it's not totally irrational to be freaked out
| by this. Think about the distribution of the error rate.
|
| A lot of fatal accidents can be attributed to inexperience,
| distracted driving, running lights, drugs, alcohol, asleep at
| the wheel, medical events or extremely aggressive driving.
|
| The distribution of unsafe driving is not even. Personally I
| had 2 accidents in my teens and 0 for the following 20 years.
|
| Your typical taxi driver will be fired/fined/reported over
| time if they drive this way. Further, if you are in a taxi
| where you notice a driver making you uncomfortable, you can
| end the ride early (I have).
|
| However, imagine a robodriver that is 4x safer, however every
| single vehicle on the road has the same probability in any
| instant of invoking the same "no human would make this
| mistake" driving error fatally.
|
| An analogy would be that at any moment, your calm, courteous,
| focussed spouse behind the wheel suddenly transforms into a
| 17 year old teen in a Mustang.
| dcow wrote:
| But I'm 4x safer. I'll take those odds.
| hnfong wrote:
| There's a difference between "I'm 4x safer", and "I'm
| expected to be 4x safer than the average person is now".
|
| The GP is arguing that there is a way to actively become
| safer than the average person by avoid getting into
| "dangerous" situations. This may or may not be 4x safer
| than average though. There's this element of control that
| is lost when it comes to AI driving.
|
| The relevant point to you is, if you already have good
| driving skills, always drive responsibly, and generally
| avoid driving in areas/times that have more drunken
| drivers around, then you might not actually benefit 4x.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, this is the point I am making. If you do not engage
| in risky behavior, and are not distracted, you are likely
| already 2-4x safer than an average driver. So AI driving
| may not make your driving better.
|
| Next problem is everyone else's driving! It's like an
| arms race / tragedy of the commons issue as well. Your
| safe driving doesn't matter if other people are still
| running lights / driving drunk / etc. In absence of near-
| perfect AI driving, followed by government mandates to
| take everyone else off the street.. it doesn't matter.
| And this is never going to happen.
| the8472 wrote:
| It makes no difference to the pedestrian, cyclist or any
| other party in a crash. One does not choose whether one
| crashes with/gets run over by a novice or an experienced
| driver.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes but this falls into the "never going to happen"
| clause of my response.
|
| Unless the government is taking everyone else except the
| imaginary future perfect robots off the road, its all a
| moot point.
| the8472 wrote:
| It doesn't require government action. Insurance will see
| computers causing fewer accidents, requiring lower
| payouts and adjusting rates accordingly. Penalties for
| drunk drivers might become harsher because they now have
| an alternative. Ditto for old people. Commuters will like
| having their hands and eyes free. Robo taxis will also
| make a dent in the market. Over time the number of human-
| driven vehicles will decrease on its own and it'll make
| less sense to get a driving permit in the first place.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| yes, it'd be very easy: you want a vehicle on the road, name
| who gets sued for damages and criminal culpability for
| failure.
|
| almost all our tech wants to skirt to legal system.
| thedaly wrote:
| I agree that the fixation on cars in urban/population dense
| areas is a problem and the overall use of cars in these areas
| should be offset by public transportation.
|
| I feel like the one in five Americans that live in rural areas
| is left out of the conversation though. You can't eliminate
| cars for those 60 million or so people.
| ghaff wrote:
| And, really, that understates it. I'm technically urban per
| the Census--ex-urban per ESRI. But the idea that anyone near
| me could reasonably get by with just public transit is
| laughable. And I actually live quite close to a commuter rail
| station and there is a small regional bus system.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Sounds like you and your fellow community members should
| vote for folks who will prioritize public transit rather
| than widening stroads. Poor transit options are a policy
| choice, not an inevitability. The best time to start
| advocating for livable cities was a decade ago. Second best
| time is now, so that ten years from now, you and yours will
| have more options than they have today.
|
| Folks need to be transported at higher and higher densities
| as a city's population grows. Cars are the lowest density
| carrier available. Think of how many cars fit on a four-
| lane road on a mile stretch. How many people are in those
| cars? How many trains or busses would be needed to move
| that many people? Now visualize the space taken up by those
| cars versus the space taken up by busses.
|
| That's how you solve traffic problems with a growing
| population, even for the folks who still need their cars
| because their destinations are sufficiently irregular. Mass
| transit helps those who need their cars too!
|
| As a byproduct, you don't need so many and so large parking
| lots. Think of all the parking lots around you, which I'm
| sure there are many. Imagine 80% of them were replaced with
| housing, retail, office space, parks, meeting places, etc.
| Then convert the remaining 20% to multi-story parking.
|
| Urban sprawl is a choice. Choose different.
| ghaff wrote:
| I am 50 miles outside the nearest major city. I'm on a
| busy but 2-lane total country road where my two nearest
| neighbors are on 10s of acres. There are no nearby
| businesses (much less stroads) until you get to a nearby
| small (20K) person city. I don't know how you solve that
| with mass transit. And it's considered urban as the US
| Census defines it.
|
| You may not approve that such places exist but they do.
| And folks like to live in them.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Okay, so where you live is classified incorrectly. That's
| fine. Mass transit doesn't work without the "mass" part,
| which you clearly don't have. I have no problem at all
| with your vehicle ownership or your choice of place to
| live.
| frumper wrote:
| Houston and Phoenix are 2/5 top 10 cities in America and
| both have a lower population density than the small
| farming city I live in of 50k people. America is just
| huge.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Yes, car-centric land use is horribly inefficient and the
| core of the problem. You can either throw good money
| after bad as a matter of public policy, or you can start
| strategically increasing density.
|
| But it's a choice. There are a lot of folks out there in
| the "good money after bad" camp who focus too much on
| what is and what was rather than what could be.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, the census has a binary definition and, for
| different purposes, it makes various degrees of sense
| although I can fairly easily go into one one of the
| largest US cities for a day or evening. I'm not in the
| boonies but I'm also clearly not in a location where car-
| less public transit can remotely work. And I'm not sure
| there is a reasonable mid-definition because at that
| point you're judging what degree of inconvenience is
| acceptable--which is pretty much the case with the
| regional transit system around where I live.
| dcow wrote:
| We're also only talking about "good weather" regions. There's
| no way an autonomous vehicle is capable of handling diverse
| weather, gravel roads, especially snow and ice, at the moment
| (my Tesla does not). The conversation is very myopically
| optimistic at the moment (which is fine, it should be, just
| pointing it out).
| lamontcg wrote:
| Bet you we could make an autonomous vehicle that handles
| snow and ice conditions better than the average Seattle
| driver. Most people aren't any good at driving under those
| conditions. And half of Seattle forgets how to drive in wet
| conditions after the summer is over.
| sib wrote:
| My favorite thing about Seattle drivers & traffic (lived
| there for 15 years).
|
| [rains] Radio traffic announcer: "It's slow out there
| because it's raining."
|
| [cloudy] Radio traffic announcer: "It's slow out there
| because of low visibility."
|
| [sunny] Radio traffic announcer: "It's slow out there
| because it's sunny."
| ttfkam wrote:
| This feels like a straw man to me. If someone who works in
| construction, works a ranch, tows a livestock trailer,
| manages a farm, etc. wants an F-150 or F-250 or whatever, I
| don't think the vast majority of us will even question that
| decision. Rural residents and (sub)urban residents on average
| have very different needs and goals, and I have no problem
| with that. I for one am not fixated on the 20% because by and
| large, they aren't the problem. They don't greatly contribute
| to overall traffic congestion, traffic accidents, or even
| emissions. They also shouldn't block policy directed toward
| the 80%.
|
| I'm talking about segments of the other 80% that wants a
| dually truck because it makes them look "alpha". Folks buying
| huge SUVs to feel "safe" while being more prone to rollovers,
| less able to avoid collisions, and far more likely to kill
| others--especially pedestrians--in a crash in addition to
| monopolizing greater and greater proportions of limited land
| resources.
|
| You live three miles from your nearest neighbor? Feel free to
| indulge in a raised pickup with 3 tons of bed capacity and 5
| tons of towing with my blessing.
|
| You live in one of the major metropolitan areas in the US?
| Don't buy a Hummer, Lexus SUV, or F-150, especially if safety
| is your goal. In fact, those large vehicles should require a
| new class of drivers license due to their size and
| performance characteristics just like school busses require a
| class B and motorcycles a class M due to their different
| structure and place within our highways. Buy a transit pass.
| Per capita, folks simply don't die in car accidents when they
| ride the bus or take a light rail. Don't have good/fast
| public transit infrastructure where you live? Time to vote
| for folks who will make it a priority.
|
| Because widening stroads has been tried. It doesn't work.
| They have never worked. They don't make traffic better, they
| don't make us safer on the road, they don't get us to our
| destinations safer, and they certainly don't make the most
| efficient use of land. It's time to move on. Dump all the
| stupid, oversized, single-level, paved parking lots and
| replace them with mixed-use housing, retail, and office space
| with a public transit hub.
|
| Make just enough parking so that the 20% folks who actually
| need their daily-use vehicles can visit easily. Preferably
| they can park in the park-n-rides at the outskirts and hop on
| a train to the city center so the parking fees are as cheap
| as possible. Let the 20% decide whether they want self-
| driving vehicles or not. The 80% should leave them alone and
| embrace the self-driving busses and trains for themselves.
| frumper wrote:
| When you suggest 80% of people live in urban areas, that
| statistic has a threshold of 2,534.4 people/sq mi. That isn't
| very dense. You're leaving out a lot more than 20% from the
| conversation when you talk about eliminating cars.
| Dolototo wrote:
| The most critical point though: the race stared and will not
| just stop.
|
| It's a question when not if as it's clear that we haven't found
| fundamental issues.
|
| The opposite happens: more people use it already than I thought
| and companies are stepping up with insurance to cover you.
|
| Yes the Tesla car driving into a truck, horrible but there was
| no genuine global outcry.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > the biggest hurdle will be public acceptance. The AI will not
| make the same kind of mistakes humans make. So while the
| aggregate number of accidents will be (likely much) lower
| without a human at the wheel, the AI will make deadly mistakes
| that no human would make, and this will terrify the public.
|
| I'd argue safety is _not_ a concern. There are a lot of "safe"
| things we could do, but don't. A significant percentage of the
| country doesn't even vaccinate its children. Self-driving cars
| aren't suddenly going to make us aware of our own mortality in
| ways that life itself hasn't already.
|
| The real fear is lack of accountability. If a drunk plows into
| a crowd of pedestrians, he will be dragged out of it and
| (metaphorically) lynched. Justice makes us feel better about
| circumstances beyond our control. If North Korea test-launched
| an ICBM that erroneously hit Japan, we'd declare _war_ over
| their typo. But when a self-driving car erroneously mows down
| pedestrians, we 're told to just accept it, nothing we could
| do, mumble-mumble-training-data, and tragedies like this happen
| so we can be _safer._
|
| Nothing is going to condition us to resent the idea of Safety
| more than having our personal agency and sense of justice taken
| away from us in its name.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Personal agency and justice are not provided by cars. To that
| point, how much agency do you feel you have in standstill
| bumper to bumper traffic. How much justice do you feel
| sitting in traffic, focused on the bumper stickers in front
| of you versus other actually productive activities while the
| bus or train are in motion.
|
| Cars != Liberty
|
| They never were. They have always been rapidly depreciating
| assets that are useful for one-off destinations and horrible
| externalities with regard to city planning.
| beambot wrote:
| > the same kinds of mistakes humans make
|
| We're hosed until we can instruct our vehicles to act drunk.
| basch wrote:
| The whole industry feels like the cart leading the horse to me.
|
| Not having a track to follow on/in the road (magnets, sensors
| etc.) Not mandating all cars talk to each other, working
| together like a mesh/hive/colony.
|
| I understand that has its own set of self starter issues, but
| it can be built in WHILE also doing what is currently
| happening. The fact that roads are being replaced TODAY and
| still nothing is going in them to help cars drive themselves,
| baffles me.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| > If we put more effort into self-driving busses and autonomous
| trains ... we would see much greater dividends on our
| investment and far fewer "unintuitive" errors.
|
| Everything you said made sense, except focusing on mass transit
| for FSD, for two reasons:
|
| The intent of focusing on bus/train automation comes from an
| illusion of control (we can control the lane/track, thereby) -
| hence we tend to rudimentarily attribute easy outcomes to it
| (low risk, high value).
|
| If we ignore the control part and properly think about it -
| mass transit actually higher risk for lower value.
|
| 1. Lower value: For something that involves 100+ people on
| dense economic centers, it's already running at an economy of
| scale where a human driver just makes sense. I live in Germany
| where the metro trains & trams are already _crazy_ automated.
| There is a human driver there just in case, more as a
| supervisor for the people riding (controlling hooliganism,
| jammed doors, helping challenged people, dealing with
| emergencies, etc). I see German trains as already running on
| FSD4. FSD5 full automation is a waste of time here. Using buses
| for last mile coverage for few passengers, aka treating buses
| as "big taxis" is probably worse environmentally than actual
| taxis.
|
| 2. Higher risk: By the same logic you said for cars - "far
| fewer unintuitive errors" - at a much higher capacity of mass
| transit - is far more catastrophic. Imagine a self-driving
| train had just 1 accident in 10 years, but it affected 1000
| people. It's sheer terror. Who is liable for it? Government.
| The problem with going down this mass-transit-first route is,
| one error means legislating away the entire sector.
|
| Cars are actually lower risk (individual choice, individual
| liability, accidents don't deter others from adopting) and
| higher value (last mile, moving away from the dense urban city
| plans that come with high rents and chokepoints which are
| crippling even to my beloved, beautiful German cities where
| even with all the urban sprawl, last mile is still a problem
| outside A zones).
| bluGill wrote:
| German trains are not known for being automated. I'm sure you
| have some, but not as many as you think. No tram in the world
| runs crazy automation, they all currently have a human on
| board. Only grade separated trains run fully automated. There
| might be some automation on your trains, but it isn't fully
| automated.
|
| Your second point is completely wrong: we have trains, and
| have been running them for more than 100 years. We have real
| statistics to show in the real world they are much safer than
| cars. Sure you can imagine anything you want, but when real
| science has real data why would anyone look at your imagined
| data.
| somethoughts wrote:
| The two scenarios that concern me long term are:
|
| - What happens when all of the infrastructure gets built up
| around self driving cars and peoples first hand knowledge of
| how to drive diminishes. Once a near monopoly/duopoly is
| attained by a select few SDC vendors, it will become a utility.
| Then what fallback does society have if the likely
| enshittification happens. Do we just have to live with it?
|
| - Its all fine when the companies able to do this are part of
| the most elite, technology first companies - but what happens
| when companies known to take short cuts (like the ones who can
| barely get bluetooth working for their audio infotainment
| system) start try to enter the market by focusing on lobbying
| the SDC oversight board.
| cantaloupe wrote:
| Regarding your first point... 15 year olds learn the basics
| of driving in a day. Generally speaking, it's not that
| difficult. A scenario where humans forget entirely how to
| drive and are unable to learn again is incredibly far
| fetched.
| trgn wrote:
| > the AI will make deadly mistakes that no human would make
|
| you'd be surprised what kind of mistakes humans make.
|
| Anyway, snarky comment aside. The biggest reason for optimism
| is that a world full of AI cars will remove the reptile-brained
| jostling for position that's 90% the cause of all crashes
| today, and that it will overall _slow down_ traffic. Slower,
| calm, tepid moving traffic, a bunch of electric golfcarts
| puttering around the city. That's a future of AI-only traffic
| worth signing up for.
| lvl102 wrote:
| There's no evidence to suggest that a system of self-driving
| vehicles are safer. The solution won't come from the US because
| there are way too many red tapes. It's coming from a smaller
| country perhaps Japan/Korea.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I wonder why this got buried so deep - the comments seem civil;
| maybe it's the comment to score ratio?
| tharmas wrote:
| What would happen if the only vehicles on the road were all self-
| driving? Wouldn't it be easier if all self-driving vehicles are
| only having to deal with other self-driving vehicles and hence
| less accidents?
|
| Of course other objects such as pedestrians etc will always make
| things more complicated.
| jmpman wrote:
| I've taken a Waymo a half dozen times. It tends to go through
| residential neighborhoods instead of making a left across
| traffic. It felt like it went miles through the neighborhood at
| 15mph instead of on the main street at 45mph. Somehow I expect
| they failed to mention these types of "optimizations" in their
| report. Sure these neighborhood routes are safer and 1/3 the
| speed, but we don't want to encourage an exponential increase in
| intra neighborhood traffic. Certainly not when my kids are
| playing in the road.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Are we talking about Phoenix?
| more_corn wrote:
| Except when you consider stopping in the road and preventing
| emergency vehicles from reaching emergency sites. And failing to
| respond to other emergency responder commands such as "move your
| tire off that that pedestrian's head"
| 7e wrote:
| Credit to Waymo, but it bears mentioning that Waymo also drives
| much more slowly than the comparable human driver. That helps a
| lot.
| devinprater wrote:
| Yay! Maybe in a good Five years(TM), I, a blind person, will
| finally be able to drive! Um, be driven? Ride? Anyway, whatever
| they'll call it when one isn't actually driving a self-driving
| car.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| but won't be culpable in 99.999999% of fatalities.
|
| tell us who on the programming team will act as tribute and you
| can have your mostly autonomous wealth consumption device.
|
| remember, it's driving itself, by itself, that's wasting
| resources when public transportation would eliminate orders of
| magnitude more issues.
| 1-6 wrote:
| How many 9's would that be? Should it be miles/interventions or
| miles/incidents?
|
| I would think a better scoring system should be based upon human
| interventions.
| lawlessone wrote:
| They seem to be doing it the right way.
|
| Unlike, Uber , Tesla and Cruise.
| yinser wrote:
| I think I see your argument is economic for Uber, human-
| intervention for Cruise, but what is the wrong way for Tesla?
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Vapourware.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| It's so crazy how my vaporware does like 99% of my driving
| for me every day. I guess I am living in a vapor world
| where I happily pay $200/mo for vapor.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| No insult intended, but you're literally beta ... good
| luck with that, honestly.
|
| But if you cannot see the issue with what has been
| promised, and what has been delivered, you're not living
| in vapour world, you're living in kool-aid world. You
| should be insulted, but instead you drink it up.
|
| Again, no offense, you make your choices, everyone else
| makes theres, and the world moves on ... but the FSD saga
| has been an absolute sh1tshow by any reasonable
| definition.
| gfodor wrote:
| You should try thinking about why the term vaporware has
| the word "vapor" in it, and what it's intended to
| describe.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Would condensed-vapourware be more preferred by you?
|
| vapourware /'veIp@we:/ nouninformal*Computing noun:
| vapourware; noun: vaporware software or
| hardware that has been advertised but is not yet
| available to buy, either because it is only a concept or
| because it is still being written or designed.
| gfodor wrote:
| I see, so you'd classify Tesla's FSD as software that has
| been advertised but is not yet available to buy, because
| it is only a concept or is still being written or
| designed. Got it.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Correct. Glad we're getting somewhere here.
|
| Very much still being written and designed. The fact that
| people are paying for a beta product is problematic to
| me, but that goes back to the snake-oil argument - a
| phenomenon well understood over time.
|
| Hence, let's shake hands on: condensed-vapourware.
|
| Good day.
| gfodor wrote:
| No, by your definition any software released with bugs in
| a beta program users can pay to be a part of, while it's
| being developed, is vaporware. Under that definition
| you'd need to invent another word for what currently
| constitutes the actual meaning of vaporware, which is
| software that has not been released to real users. (Ie,
| software that for all intents and purposes doesn't exist,
| ie, its vaporous.)
| renewiltord wrote:
| The thing I've noticed is that people who buy Teslas love
| their car and people who don't hate it. It actually
| reminds me of the iPhone. Everyone who bought it loved it
| and there were lots of people online talking about how
| shit it was.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It's so crazy how my vaporware does like 99% of my
| driving for me every day._
|
| There's no point lying about how finicky it is, or the
| number of disengagements you encounter. There's too much
| evidence to the contrary.
|
| Recently one of the biggest FSD proponents on Twitter put
| out, essentially, a promotional video for FSD, and it
| showed multiple disengagements and an incredibly
| dangerous blown stop sign.
|
| Nobody cares that half your commute you can sit there
| pretending not to drive down a highway. That's not full
| self driving.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| At this point I don't understand what the Tesla haters
| are even talking about.
|
| I have the software. I use it daily. I am happy with it.
|
| Somebody in twitter did a dangerous demonstration. This
| doesn't change much.
|
| Let's talk about a different technology and maybe that
| could help you understand this:
|
| There was a time when consumer drone tech would be looked
| at as "vaporware". Almost certainly somebody in the 90s
| advertised something looking functionally like a DJI
| phantom and never delivered on it. Pretty much ever you
| robot I got advertised as a child comes to mind.
|
| If somebody took a DJI phantom and crashed it into a
| building, does that make the current, existing, very real
| technology into "vaporware" in your mind?
|
| There was a time when self driving tech was also
| vaporware, but that time has passed. Somebody using
| existing, very real technology in a stupid way doesn't
| mean that it suddenly doesn't _exist_.
| chikitabanana wrote:
| I'm interested - can you link this?
| ra7 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1727889381309239731
| ra7 wrote:
| > _Recently one of the biggest FSD proponents on Twitter
| put out, essentially, a promotional video for FSD, and it
| showed multiple disengagements and an incredibly
| dangerous blown stop sign._
|
| Don't forget, it was actually a comparison between Waymo
| and Tesla in SF. They tried so hard to show Tesla was
| better, but it was embarrassing how flat out dangerous it
| was.
|
| Here's the compilation:
| https://twitter.com/elaifresh/status/1727889381309239731
| Zarel wrote:
| I feel like accusing someone of lying is a bit of a leap.
| I would just guess the guy you're replying to lives
| somewhere easier to drive than SF.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| The whole point of self-driving, and why it's hard, is to
| handle that 1%. Nobody is saying you shouldn't be
| thrilled at the product or that it's not worth $200/mo to
| you. But it's not autonomous driving. It's not a
| robotaxi. You're paying for something else. The vaporware
| comment is in reference to Elon Musk's robotaxi claims --
| he sold the product as something it isn't.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Lies and overpromising. I can say with a brutally straight
| face that our 2024 base-model Subaru Impreza's Level 2
| features are safer than my 2018 Model 3's Autopilot. Less
| unsafe disengagements, less yanking the wheel random
| directions on strange markings, no sun-based issues.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Tesla has killed by far the most people. They misrepresented
| their system to users and investors and almost entirely
| skipped testing to make consumers the testers, so they could
| try to catch up despite being almost a decade behind.
|
| Our economy is built on a regulatory framework that protects
| consumers from companies that cut corners.
|
| I've heard people say that Tesla is in the right because in
| the long term the tech will save more lives.
|
| That's nonsense. If Tesla didn't cut corners, Waymo would get
| there just as fast as Tesla will cutting corners.
| mplewis9z wrote:
| > Tesla has killed by far the most people
|
| They've also driven by far the most miles. I'm no diehard
| Tesla fan, but I hate it when people don't properly scale
| their data.
| Veserv wrote:
| Take that up with Tesla. Tesla actively redacts their
| crash information and chooses to not publish even the
| most basic of data such as distance or crash counts, only
| unsubstantiated, unaudited conclusions. It is not the
| duty of the public to grant the benefit of the doubt to a
| deadly, incomplete product. It is the duty of the
| manufacturer to provide robust data and analysis
| corroborated by unbiased third parties positively
| establishing a sufficient degree of safety.
|
| Tesla killed people, it is up to them to demonstrate the
| rate is sufficiently low to be considered safe. However,
| if Tesla chooses, as they do, to not produce robust
| evidence of its death rate that competent third parties
| are allowed to audit, then it should be presumed to be
| unsafe. Anything less does not meet even the basic
| standards expected of safety-critical product
| development.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _but what is the wrong way for Tesla?_
|
| 1. "We are leaders in FSD technology, but you have to hover
| your hands over the wheel and foot over the brake to take
| control at any second."
|
| 2. "Our FSD is far safer than manual driving, so says our
| data. But you have to take our word for it, because we won't
| release the data for research."
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Waymo currently operates commercial robotaxi services in
| Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco,
|
| Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to
| Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7wphiL3vbo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZaoRu7okU
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Even in those scenarioes, I'd still trust Waymo far more than
| the current substandard, falsely-advertised, snake-oil
| alternative offerings ...
| gfodor wrote:
| It's funny that you've got several teams of thousands of
| engineers working on this and you label the one as "snake-
| oil" that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of
| cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Cruise and Uber were equally snake oil, too, and have
| spilled more blood than Waymo or Tesla.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Tesla Self Drive seems to have peaked? I follow the forums
| and subreddits on this topic, and no one has been talking
| about major improvements for a while now.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I see no evidence of a reliable, working product delivered
| as promised/advertised. For years now.
|
| What do you want me to do? Pretend?
|
| Perhaps MDS is real ...
| gfodor wrote:
| Do you think Tesla's approach to FSD is similarly
| difficult as their peers' approach, and they are just
| lazy and incompetent, or do you think their approach is
| fundamentally easier or harder? Have you thought about it
| at all?
| ra7 wrote:
| Who cares about approach? Consumers only care if the
| product works or not. They haven't made it work and don't
| look like they will make it work.
|
| You don't get brownie points if you deliberately
| hamstring yourselves (no sensors, no maps) and make the
| problem harder than it already is. It's like trying to
| jump higher and higher to fly to moon instead of using
| rockets. It doesn't mean you're tackling a fundamentally
| harder problem.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I think Musk has consistently lied about engineers'
| understanding of how FSD can work.
| https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/elon-musk-overruled-
| tesla-...
|
| He repeatedly claimed that having contradictory radar and
| camera data means the system won't know what data to
| trust. Anybody who has worked with data in any capacity
| can tell you that is complete nonsense. In the past,
| people would call combining this data "sensor fusion."
| These days, even high school kids know you just throw all
| your features into a model. You don't discard red channel
| data from your cameras because it might conflict with
| green channel data. Tesla Insurance doesn't throw away
| all features except driver age when calculating premiums.
| jtr1 wrote:
| "{name} Derangement Syndrome" is a really neat tool for
| filtering out opposing viewpoints. Pro tip: save it as a
| hotkey for easy deployment.
| gfodor wrote:
| No, there are only two valid values for {name} where this
| kind of dynamic is both real and useful to observe, the
| rest I would agree with you.
| jtr1 wrote:
| Nice, you keep those thought-terminating cliches locked
| and loaded
| metabagel wrote:
| It seems to be forever in beta. It's not clear that the
| technology as currently implemented can ever achieve what
| it set out to do.
| gfodor wrote:
| That's true, it's still unclear if the method Tesla is
| taking will eventually work. That's not the definition of
| snake oil. They're approaching the problem differently,
| because they think if they solve it this way it will be a
| better outcome for a variety of reasons, and are working
| extremely hard on it.
| djur wrote:
| What makes people call it snake oil is the salesperson
| (Musk) repeatedly making false claims about both the
| capability (summon your car from across the country...)
| and availability (... by 2018!) of the technology.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The key part of it being "snake oil" is selling the
| system before it actually works. It has nothing to do
| with the approach to solving the problem.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| I initially read this as referring to human-driven vehicles
| as substandard, falsely-advertized, and snake-oil, which...
| Fair...
|
| For what it's worth, as a pedestrian walking around SF late
| at night I absolutely do trust Waymo more than human driven
| cars.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Have you actually driven in SF? There's plenty of rain in the
| winter and the roads can get quite interesting. Right turns
| that are actually 170 degrees and a 15% incline. Red lights
| that are way off to the side and obscured (one on market right
| after you turn right exiting 101). It's honestly a pretty good
| stress test as far as American cities go.
| nradov wrote:
| As a stress test, SF is good but not great. Autonomous
| vehicles seem to have huge problems dealing with snow due to
| the obscured lane lines. It never really snows in SF (maybe a
| few flakes in rare conditions but not enough to stick).
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I don't see why not being able to see lane lines would be a
| the problem, at least for the full-fat Waymo solution. My
| understanding is they are using lidar sensors to correlate
| their exact position in addition to GPS which can be
| accurate to sub-meter level. In fact, they would have much
| more information to go on than most wet-wear drivers,
| assuming they can correlate the position of street
| furniture etc.
|
| The bigger problem I would imagine is finding the car not
| responding to inputs in a predictable way. I would image at
| a certain point they are going to give up. Even a human
| driver might need a push in some conditions.
| danans wrote:
| > It never really snows in SF (maybe a few flakes in rare
| conditions but not enough to stick).
|
| It never snows, but between the fog and strong winter
| storms directly off the Pacific, visibility can often be
| near zero in SF. I've lost sight of lanes and surroundings
| many times.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I lived in SF and besides the occasional annoyance of parking
| my motorcycle in heavily inclined streets I don't remember
| anything remotely problematic. I remember plenty of waymo
| cars glitching though but that was a long time ago.
|
| tbh waymo's ceo said what I said here:
| https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-
| ceo...
| jjulius wrote:
| You lived in SF and still feel confident saying that it
| gets 365 days of sun?
| vpribish wrote:
| that's ridiculous. I live in SF now and the driving
| situation is seriously challenging.
|
| Even the straight, flat, streets can be nuts - like Polk
| St: pedestrians can jump out anywhere, slalom of delivery
| trucks, delivery scooters, ride-hail cars, double parallel-
| parked, with bike lanes - its a major cyclist route also
| busses and those little tourist scooters - oh and the
| electric unicycles that are always blowing stop-signs! the
| type, shape, size, and behavior is all over the map. go two
| blocks over and you have to deal with cable-pulled trolleys
| having the right of way across the 12% grade intersection.
| last week there were hundreds of drunken santa-clauses jay-
| walking between bars. oh and the line of tourist cars (who
| knows what traffic behavior they might follow!) heading up
| to see the crooked street - as the high school is getting
| out.
|
| LOL get your memory checked, memory checked, if you recall
| driving in SF as unproblematic.
| jjulius wrote:
| >tbh waymo's ceo said what I said here:
| https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-
| ceo...
|
| All the CEO said was that he thinks autonomous driving
| won't work in every condition or ever be perfect, and that
| they're always finding and working through unique
| challenges. That's quite a bit different from "our cars
| only work on straight lines and with 365 days of sun".
| cagenut wrote:
| hell you don't even have to go to old europe, lets see them
| make it to and from newark airport
| askonomm wrote:
| I'm hoping they work up to the complexity of European roads
| eventually. Start small and iterate, y'know.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I'm waiting to see how it will handle Chinese roads. A few
| self driving startups in China actually, although I haven't
| heard anything from them recently. It would be the gold
| standard for a self driving car to handle Beijing roads,
| drivers, and pedestrians.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Beirut and Manila are both crazier than Beijing from what I
| remember.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I've never been to Beirut but Manila, I just remember
| being stuck in traffic all the time. It didn't seem worse
| than China, just a complete lack of infrastructure
| causing everything to seize over. China has more traffic
| deaths per capita (15/100k) than the Philippines
| (10/100k), in any case.
| dmoy wrote:
| I haven't been to Beirut, but I have been to Beijing a
| bunch, and by brother has been to Beirut I think at least
| twice. From what he tells me, Beirut is crazier driving
| than Beijing. In like all respects.
|
| The traffic fatalities are higher (18 > 15), the lack of
| lanes is more egregious (and people will dive across
| three lanes more aggressively), the amount of driving the
| wrong way down busy multi lane roads is more (which still
| happens in Beijing, but like not as often).
|
| Beirut (or at least the outskirts) also has things
| Beijing doesn't: civilian enforcement of traffic
| etiquette via brandishing automatic rifles, traffic
| intersections primarily controlled by tanks instead of
| signals, and the annoying practice carried over from
| Saudis of doing that stupid angled drive-with-the-car-
| tilted-on-two-wheels thing in thd middle of traffic.
|
| It's similar to Beijing in it always being slow though,
| so that's probably why the fatality rate isn't 30+ lol.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I spent 9 years in Beijing and saw some crazy stuff. Like
| a woman pulled over on the side of fourth ring by the
| police (weird in itself) then she gets back into her car
| and rams the police car in front of her by accident.
| Backing up in the expressway because you missed your exit
| is common, I saw a cyclist killed by a taxi on dongzhimen
| wai who was racing a green light about to turn red (the
| bicycle was crossing against a red). Oh, and the badly
| modded small car whose wheels popped off all at once
| while speeding on third ring. The most common traffic,
| though was slow without any yielding for pedestrians (the
| cars would just try to avoid you instead). Oh, and that's
| 2016, it was already much better than my first visit in
| 1999 where buses hit the roads at night without their
| headlights turned on for some reason.
|
| But ya, none of the drivers were armed, so we had that at
| least :)
| baz00 wrote:
| Kyrgyzstan roads. I was nearly killed by a Chinese truck
| swerving around a donkey which was chilling in the middle
| of the road in the middle of the night.
| dmoy wrote:
| I think both Baidu and pony are allowed to run no-safety-
| driver taxis for $$ in Beijing now (as of this year).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Oh wow. I totally want to see that on my next trip. If
| they are running well enough, they've probably already
| beat waymo.
| culopatin wrote:
| Have you seen the streets of SF? Sometimes you can't even see
| what's ahead because you're going from a 15% up to a 15% down
| and all you see is the horizon
| ramraj07 wrote:
| SF is a fairly tricky place to drive. I mean it's no Boston but
| it's no mean feat.
|
| Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self
| driving cars in more "feral" places where anything goes as
| traffic rules go. In those places, what I've observed, is that
| you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and
| everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is).
| This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
| ocschwar wrote:
| Boston is the IDEAL place to test out autonomous driving. The
| narrow roads, lined as they are with trees, rocks, and parked
| cars, mean that when an autonomous car makes the wrong
| decision, the damage will be primarily to property, Waymo's
| and the other guy, and Waymo can just cut a check, learn some
| lessons, and move on.
|
| (BTW, Boston's reputation as a place for aggressive driving
| is undeserved. Insurance companies pay a lot for fender
| repair for the reason above, making the city look bad, but
| for injuries against a person, insurers just pay the limit,
| which an injured pedestrian can run up in the first 24 hours
| in a hospital. Anything beyond that doesn't show up in car
| insurance statistics. Houston and Austin have far more
| aggressive drivers, for instance.)
| ghaff wrote:
| It's also true that the old elevated central artery was
| _really bad_ and pretty much required aggressive behavior
| because of how many ramps there were and the fact that you
| had to navigate a confusing network of crowded surface
| streets to access the harbor tunnels. I 've admittedly
| lived in the area a long time but between the Big Dig and
| GPS, I don't think Boston is uniquely bad these days.
| masto wrote:
| Arizona maybe, but I wouldn't say San Francisco is straight
| lines. I've seen a few of these videos pop up on YouTube. This
| one I watched recently is full of construction, double-parked
| trucks, pedestrians, complicated traffic, etc.
|
| https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG
|
| It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not
| understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it
| phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again.
| Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
|
| Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with
| cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to
| see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll
| ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place
| with weather.
| ghaff wrote:
| It may not get snowstorms but I would say significant areas
| of San Francisco are absolutely not particularly easy to
| drive in.
|
| Understanding someone directing traffic is probably one of
| the harder problems.
|
| To another point, to the degree that it's predictable ahead
| of time, I'd be perfectly happy with a car that only could
| self-drive in some conditions. Only highway for some subset
| of weather conditions? That would still be super-useful for
| some of us.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| Yes, its good engineering practice to solve the easier problems
| before solving the hard ones.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It was raining yesterday and the Waymos were out but it doesn't
| matter that much. You won't get self-driving cars in your
| streets in Europe and that's okay.
|
| It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm
| sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device
| to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25%
| market share there but they're one of the most successful
| companies in the world, without Romania.
|
| Some markets can be irrelevant.
| ocschwar wrote:
| An autonomous system doesn't just put together classifications
| of what it sees in the environment.
|
| It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should
| be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures
| decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European
| towns should be doable.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't understand the point of comments like this, and I see
| them all the time when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
|
| First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your
| characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365
| days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a
| consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if
| it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to
| have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't
| drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
|
| And, of course, wouldn't one _expect_ an autonomous vehicle to
| start in places with better conditions vs yolo 'ing it in a
| blizzard whiteout?
| unregistereddev wrote:
| It is not just bad weather. Here in the midwest it's common
| for the road lines to be worn and barely visible. There are
| many more potholes and other problems with the pavement.
|
| My 2023 car with cameras and radar usually cannot activate
| lane centering - even in good weather - because it cannot
| tell where the lanes are.
|
| Having driven in both San Francisco and throughout the
| midwest, I agree with the parent commenter that San Francisco
| is a much easier environment for self-driving cars.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't really disagree, but again, I don't understand the
| point about complaining about "Pfft, Waymo can only operate
| in good conditions". I mean, it wasn't _that_ long ago when
| Google 's autonomous vehicle tech was first announced and
| everyone thought it looked like magic.
|
| More and more I believe in Louis CK's bit about "everything
| is amazing and nobody's happy":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
| Spivak wrote:
| Because there's two things going on. There's the
| autonomous driving technology which is god damn amazing
| and a huge technical achievement even if it only works in
| ideal conditions.
|
| Then there's the sheisters trying to sell that technology
| and convince governments that "for safety" people should
| be required to buy their product. Poking holes in the
| technology is people's natural response to the very real
| fear that their ability to operate a vehicle that isn't
| literally controlled by a huge corporation will be taken
| away.
|
| The technology is amazing, humans suck.
|
| You see the same thing with EVs, rather than it being a
| purely positive thing that the market has more options
| for people with different driving patterns you have
| governments committing to banning the sale of new ICE
| cars when the deployment is literally in its infancy
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Then there's the sheisters trying to sell that
| technology and convince governments that "for safety"
| people should be required to buy their product.
|
| That feels like a massive straw man. I'm not aware of
| anyone at this point, or with any plans, to require the
| use of autonomous vehicles.
|
| > You see the same thing with EVs, rather than it being a
| purely positive thing that the market has more options
| for people with different driving patterns you have
| governments committing to banning the sale of new ICE
| cars when the deployment is literally in its infancy
|
| That also doesn't make sense to me. Governments don't
| want to push to EVs because the tech is some nirvana or
| something, but continued use of ICE vehicles is a large
| contributor to climate change and we have very limited
| time to address that.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You have to recognize these as the right-wing dogwhistles
| that they are. The idea that autonomous driving and
| vehicle electrification are control strategies by an
| oppressive deep state are constantly pushed on far-right
| social media.
| rajup wrote:
| > autonomous driving and vehicle electrification are
| control strategies by an oppressive deep state
|
| Wait.. what? That's definitely a new one to me...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Starter pack: https://www.tiktok.com/find/real-agenda-
| behind-electric-cars
| shkkmo wrote:
| I assume this is referring to how Europe requires new
| vehicles be sold with automatic emergency braking.
|
| If we do reach a point where self driving systems
| consistently outperfom humans in term or safety, I would
| absolutely expect a push to atleast require it in new
| vehicles if not some form of new law to push people
| towards using that technology. Personally, I find that
| idea attractive but I understand why people would fear
| it.
| runnr_az wrote:
| It still looks like magic when I see cars without drivers
| here in PHX. We'll have them on the freeway soon enough -
| potentially a game changer for our city
| camgunz wrote:
| > potentially a game changer for our city
|
| My bet is you'll be amazed by how little changes. Sure
| you won't spend any time at gas stations/car dealerships
| and you'll be able to watch YouTube on your commute, but
| that's how millions of New Yorkers live and, well, it's
| fine. That is to say, we could have just built
| subways/mass transit and gotten all of the benefits.
|
| There is a major downside though, and it's that we'll be
| doubling down on cars. That means all the mining we have
| to do for all the components, all the road/vehicle
| maintenance we have to do, all the waste we have to
| manage, all the pollution from tires, all the space taken
| up by roads, garages, parking spaces, all the batteries
| we have to build/maintain/recycle, all the sprawl and
| isolation we suffer will increase.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > My bet is you'll be amazed by how little changes. Sure
| you won't spend any time at gas stations/car dealerships
| and you'll be able to watch YouTube on your commute, but
| that's how millions of New Yorkers live and, well, it's
| fine. That is to say, we could have just built
| subways/mass transit and gotten all of the benefits.
|
| I'm a big fan of public transportation, and I think it's
| sad that so many cities have underinvested. But it
| doesn't help your point to pretend that commuting on a
| bus or subway is the same thing as commuting in an
| autonomous personal vehicle, and these kinds of false
| equivalencies only serve to discredit mass transit
| advocates.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > I don't understand the point of comments like this,
|
| I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like
| this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly
| the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving
| companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything.
| It's a fluff piece.
|
| If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you
| need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of
| the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous
| country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome
| for an hour
| mdorazio wrote:
| No, you don't. This study is very clearly comparing to
| human drivers on the same streets and time period. Thus,
| you definitely can say that the human drivers are worse.
|
| Tautological puff pieces are what Tesla does with many of
| its cherry-picked stats, but this data is much more
| definitive.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >you definitely can say that the human drivers are worse
|
| No, you can't. You can say the drivers are worse _only on
| the segments where Waymo was willing to test it_ , and
| that is worthless. It literally is cherry picking. What
| does it matter to people driving in Boston, Chicago, New
| York, Paris or Berlin if cars can drive safely on a
| suburban grid in Arizona?
|
| If you get to pick the sample you get to pick the
| outcome. We could literally put these cars on the worst
| 1% of roads and get the opposite result. In fact we could
| put them on the worst 90% of roads and get the opposite
| result. Even the average American consumer gets no
| meaningful info out of this.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Waymo is doing a level 4 rollout to specific areas where
| they are confident they can operate them safely. This
| study shows they are doing a good job with that. People
| in these markets get access to safer transportation once
| they can scale. Indeed, the majority of the US population
| lives in areas that are roughly comparable in driving
| complexity to either SF for Pheonix.
|
| The real question is if these safety rates can be
| maintained while reducing the operational costs to the
| point where this can be scaled.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This makes no sense. Waymo is _not_ saying their cars
| outperform human drivers in all situations. They are
| saying they outperform human drivers in the location
| where they 've been deployed. It's exactly an apples-to-
| apples comparison.
|
| > You can say the drivers are worse only on the segments
| where Waymo was willing to test it, and that is
| worthless.
|
| That's not worthless at all. There are tons of places in
| the US, maybe even a majority, that are quite similar to
| something between SF and Phoenix. Yes, absolutely, there
| are tons of places it's not. Again, so what? I just don't
| understand why anyone would expect that Waymo would _not_
| start with a progressive rollout.
| fooblaster wrote:
| I took a waymo last night in the rain in union square in SF. I
| assure you it wasn't easy, many merges, people walking in the
| road, cars to pass, etc.
| jfoster wrote:
| Getting commercial robotaxis working in even just one city is
| an amazing achievement. It's important to note that Uber
| currently operates in more than 10,000 cities, though. Even if
| Waymo were to launch one new city each week, it would be more
| than 192 years before they catch up to Uber.
| bmitc wrote:
| They did try in the upper midwest, and they failed completely.
| When the sensors are covered by rain, ice, snow, salt, and
| other road grime, the cars are basically useless.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Obviously you roll out a safety critical system like this in
| the simplest scenarios first as you build confidence.
|
| Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just
| shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that
| the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to
| safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog
| because your options are basically drive too fast and risk
| hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow
| speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault
| but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes
| with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined
| limits where they won't fly.
|
| Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with
| a safe priority system. Priorite a droite is a silly rule, and
| it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes
| there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
| notatoad wrote:
| people love to say this like it's some sort of "gotcha" claim,
| and waymo is cheating at safety by only rolling out their
| service in places where they're certain they can operate
| safely.
|
| how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more
| challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and
| responsible.
| rajup wrote:
| I read comments along this vein every time an article on Waymo
| (or self driving cars) comes out, and my question is who cares?
| Even if it is just the sunny easy locations that get this
| advance, that's hundreds of deaths and injuries avoided every
| year. I understand being pragmatic and practical but we should
| celebrate this news IMO.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Waymo drives better in San Francisco than I do, and I live
| here. And it drives an order of magnitude better than I did
| during my first few months in the city. I have friends who live
| in the South Bay who are still reluctant to drive when they
| visit SF.
| sib wrote:
| I recently took a Waymo test ride through a bunch of
| neighborhood streets in LA.
|
| Not straight lines, lots of traffic, cars parked on both sides
| of roads, plenty of human drivers seemingly unable to cope.
|
| (Admittedly, mostly sunny weather.)
| yinser wrote:
| As optimistic as I am about self-driving it seems like the "9s"
| model of reliability isn't the right model here because one
| "outage" could be someone being killed. The aftershock of the
| Cruise car dragging someone shows how far one accident can sully
| a company.
|
| The other issue I see is that I believe Waymo doesn't live map
| the terrain in SF and Arizona right? They are using intricately
| created maps and so my question is what's the leap for Waymo to
| operate with this success in say Pittsburgh?
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| As much as I hate Elon, I do think that a proven 'better than a
| human by [X]times.' is a fair metric...as long as it is
| independently verified in ALL situations AND the company takes
| responsibility for the outcome.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Good luck with getting ALL situations.
|
| My theory is that as we face climate change more and more and
| as the economy goes out of whack owning a car will be a
| privilege for the rich and super rich. Sort of like it's
| already the case in parts of Europe.
|
| At that point this self-driving crap is going to look
| ridiculous. Even without it it's ridiculous testing this
| technology on public roads and gambling with everyone's life.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| I think in urban areas that is exceptionally true. Here in
| the US there are places you can drive for 200 miles and not
| see a single human.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Highway self-driving is mostly a solve problem (except
| maybe Tesla which will occasionally fuck it up). Urban
| areas are where the problems are at nowadays.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The aftershock of the Cruise car dragging someone shows how
| far one accident can sully a company.
|
| Cruise's problem was hiding the footage from the regulators. As
| the saying goes, "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up."
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/gms-cruise-robotax...
|
| > In a Dec. 1 filing recounting how Cruise handled disclosures
| about the accident, the Public Utilities Commission asserted
| the company tried to conceal how its robotaxi reacted to the
| accident for more than two weeks. Cruise didn't provide the
| video footage until Oct. 19, according to the regulatory
| filing. The cover-up spanned 15 days, according to the PUC,
| exposing Cruise and GM to potential fines of $100,000 per day,
| or $1.5 million.
| wernercd wrote:
| The problem I have with that argument is what's the comparison
| to, say, drunk driving or impaired driving?
|
| While a car "dragging" someone can be traumatic and horrible in
| it's own right... objectively, if we could get rid of thousands
| of deaths a year in exchange for fewer "mishaps"?
|
| In 2021 2,116 people age 15-20 died in car crashes. 13,384
| people for DUI related deaths in 2021. 42,939 car related
| deaths.
|
| If we could exchange 42k deaths for 1,000? wouldn't that be
| worth the tradeoff?
|
| Basically the trolly problem where you have to choose between
| letting a train go forward and kill 5 people or hitting a
| button to change tracks and kill 1.
|
| If we can get into the "9's" in accuracy and trust bypassing
| humans... why wouldn't we?
| flextheruler wrote:
| You're going to compare self-driving cars to drunk drivers so
| you can grade them on a curve?
|
| If you're drunk you're going to have pay for a ride either by
| a person or possible by program or you can break the law. I
| don't see anyone who was going to drive drunk not do it
| because they could pay for a robot taxi over a real taxi.
| Here's my comparison. If your self-driving car kills or maims
| someone in a situation where a normal sober person driving
| wouldn't have it shouldn't be on the road.
| janosett wrote:
| > If your self-driving car kills or maims someone in a
| situation where a normal sober person driving wouldn't have
|
| What if it does this while also _not_ killing/harming in
| many other situations where a human would have?
| x86x87 wrote:
| Is this a problem that needs solving? Would you be
| comfortable dying in a car crash where it's due to faulty
| software? What if you replace the humans with machines and
| after that as a result of a bug you get 200k deaths in a
| year?
| ggreer wrote:
| If that were the case, liability insurance rates for self-
| driving vehicles would be much much higher than their
| manually piloted counterparts.
| jseliger wrote:
| _could be someone being killed_
|
| Have you been paying attention to the status quo at all?
| https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
|
| If not, you might want to.
| https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
|
| I live in Arizona and have taken Waymo a bunch. It's great!
| https://twitter.com/seligerj/status/1707259311809073313/vide...
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Would you take the same in New York?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Have you been paying attention to the status quo at all?_
|
| Humans make mistakes and car accidents happen. We don't and
| won't accept the same from machines. Why is that so hard to
| understand?
| mrtksn wrote:
| IMHO we need a standardised benchmark for this stuff.
|
| You can't claim better than human when humans are driving under
| different conditions.
|
| I looked around to try to find the actual data but it's just
| marketing materials. Are these miles on the same roads under the
| same traffic and weather conditions?
| x86x87 wrote:
| C'mon man. Everyone knows these stats are doctored to create
| the illusion that somehow self driving cars are better than
| humans (spoiler: they are not if you consider all road and
| weather conditions). I will say this though: at least with
| waymo the car is not actively trying to kill you and is dumb af
| when it comes to egde cases like other "self-driving" cars
| renewiltord wrote:
| AFAICT the cars are everywhere I'd go. They're just on normal
| streets and when you take them they're just like normal drivers
| (except they don't run reds and are politer).
| flutas wrote:
| They don't go on the freeway for public rides currently iirc.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah sorry. I thought he meant on city roads. You are right.
| I've seen them on the freeways but never fully autonomous.
| blago wrote:
| Snow?
| boulos wrote:
| See my top-level comment: same locations, adjusting for surface
| streets only, etc.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Thanks for the clarifications.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| >The new data comes at a crucial time for the self-driving
| industry.
|
| Which is by the way, a good reason to be skeptical of it. I
| remember talking to someone who worked with BMW on their self
| driving a long time ago and their take on Tesla's self driving
| effort was (a) It's fine for Tesla to have a bad reputation for
| safey but BMW simply can't choose to get a bad reputation for
| safety they sell far too many non-autonomous cars and (b) It's
| actually not fine for Tesla (and others) to be rushing ahead with
| self-driving because they _will_ kill people and they 're just as
| likely to kill the whole self-driving industry at the same time.
|
| I have no doubt that even if the data looked terrible, Waymo
| would find a way to spin it to look safe. I also have no doubt
| that even if the data is good, it's not indicative of self-
| driving being safer in the average situation.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Wouldn't that claim of "only 3 minor injuries" be relatively
| easy to refute?
|
| Sure, I'm not so naive to think there's no corporate spin, and
| especially with Alphabet's marketing and media resources and
| the need for positive sentiment towards Waymo, but I think if
| Waymo's safety record were anywhere near Tesla's (or Cruise's)
| it would be very hard to spin this well and not be refuted,
| they would be better off not giving an update in that case.
| kredd wrote:
| The way I'm reading the PR right now -- Cruise damaged the
| public's perception of self-driving cars by cover up. Now the
| ball is on Waymo's court to over-prove that they're safe and
| transparent. Unfortunately this is one of the problems where
| "vibes over facts" persist. As in, a lot of people will argue
| that a self-driving car killing 10 people is worse than real
| people killing 20 people. It's not that easy to change public's
| sentiment, especially when there's a huge truckloads of money
| is on the table for multiple industries either to lose or gain
| at the end.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is like saying a shitty doctor is okay because they kill
| less people than a faith healer. You have to hold
| professionals to a higher standard. This is not rocket
| science.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A shitty doctor might be ok if your only alternative is a
| faith healer. It depends on which one has better results
| (the shitty doctor can have worse results than the placebo
| faith healer).
|
| In some places, this is a real choice to be made, and
| developed world luxuries of "holding professionals to
| higher standards" aren't available.
| kredd wrote:
| If the choice is solely between a shitty doctor and faith
| healer (picking none isn't an option as people have to get
| from A to B somehow), then you would choose shitty doctor
| though, no? In the states, I just don't see any other
| alternatives for the near future.
|
| US is a beast where super majority of people have given up
| on public transport and infrastructure. Otherwise I would
| hold the bar higher and look into alternatives.
| the8472 wrote:
| Sir, our data analysis shows that you and your family would
| have been crushed under one of our trucks last month if it
| hadn't been for its autonomous driving software. Based on
| your internet commenting history you have expressed a
| preference to be crushed under the vagaries of human-
| spectrum incompetence rather than being subjected to
| soulless, less-than-perfect machine behavior offered by our
| corporate overlords.
|
| We are here to offer you a correction of this regrettable
| mistake. Could you please call your family and follow us to
| the flesh compactor? We assure you that it is operated by a
| real, drunk human.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| These measurements should be standardized and independent, there
| is a large incentive for these companies to get creative with
| their record keeping and methodology.
| nlh wrote:
| _> In July, a Waymo in Tempe, Arizona, braked to avoid hitting a
| downed branch, leading to a three-car pileup._
|
| _> In August, a Waymo at an intersection "began to proceed
| forward" but then "slowed to a stop" and was hit from behind by
| an SUV._
|
| _> In October, a Waymo vehicle in Chandler, Arizona, was
| traveling in the left lane when it detected another vehicle
| approaching from behind at high speed. The Waymo tried to
| accelerate to avoid a collision but got hit from behind._
|
| It's worth noting that all 3 of these incidents involve a Waymo
| getting hit from behind, which is the other driver's fault even
| if the Waymo acted "unexpectedly". This is very very good news
| for them.
| jmckib wrote:
| That last one is impressive, most humans probably wouldn't pull
| it off. And just imagine when all the cars on the road are
| self-driving, probably none of these accidents would've
| happened.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Not if we have teslas!!!
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Why not? Has Tesla had similar incidents?
| JoshCole wrote:
| I've been in a self-driving Tesla vehicle. After hours on
| the interstate, the person ahead of me slammed on their
| brakes suddenly. I was caught off guard, not expecting
| it, and may have crashed by not reacting in time. The
| Tesla braked. So I have anecdotal experience that the
| person you're asking for an answer isn't well informed on
| how Tesla's respond to this type of accident.
|
| Of course, anecdotal evidence isn't a very high standard.
| Thankfully, statistics on this sort of thing are tracked.
| Statistically, the Tesla self-driving features reduce
| accidents per mile. They have for years now and as the
| tech has progressed the reduction has grown as the
| technology has matured. So statistical evidence also
| indicates that the person you are asking the question to
| is also uninformed.
|
| What is probably happening is that it makes for good
| clickbait to involve Elon and Tesla into discussions.
| Moreover, successful content online often provokes
| emotion. The resulting preponderance of negativity,
| especially about each driving accident Teslas were
| involved in or caused, probably tricked them into
| misunderstanding the reality of the Tesla safety record.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Statistically, the Tesla self-driving features reduce
| accidents per mile
|
| While that is the claim, I've never seen an independent
| analysis of the data. There are reasons to believe that
| Tesla drivers are not average. I don't know if what
| claims are true, which is why I want independent analysis
| of the data so that factors I didn't think of can be
| controlled for.
| x86x87 wrote:
| My Subaru from 2018 can do this. It's not rocket system
| and most cars nowadays have a collision detection system.
| This is not a slef-driving capability by any means.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Teslas keep ramming into parked vehicles on the side of
| the road, including emergency vehicles. So when a waymo
| car stops because it doesn't know how to safely proceed,
| the Teslas might just plow into it.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Nope. We'll keep having accidents if everything is self
| driving as long as we keep Tesla in the mix.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I don't even get why these count as negatives against Waymo.
| There's nothing it can do to stop idiot humans driving too
| closely or just driving into it.
| cj wrote:
| Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos hit
| from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the middle
| of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver would)?
|
| I know YouTube videos aren't always representative of
| reality, but there are some videos of these cars randomly
| driving extremely slowly in very busy intersections which
| might be a contributing factor to getting rear-ended, even if
| it's not Waymo's "fault" _from an insurance perspective_.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Doesn't matter. If you drive into a slow-moving or
| stationary object then it's your fault in every sense. If
| you are driving too closely and are not ready to react to
| the vehicle in front doing an emergency stop for any reason
| then it's your fault in every sense.
|
| Most human drivers I observe are taking huge chances every
| single day. I see them drive at speed around corners they
| can't see around fully, driving far too closely to cars
| front, using their phone etc. They get lucky but it's only
| a matter of time before they have accidents. The three
| incidents recorded here are simply due to three humans'
| luck running out.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Before jumping to conclusions..._
|
| Nah, I'm jumping _straight_ to this conclusion: if you hit
| something in front of you that didn 't leap out in front of
| you at the last second, you fucked up. The object that you
| hit was erratically slowing and speeding up? You should
| have left more room to allow for the unpredictability. It
| was raining, can't see, the roads are slick? Leave more
| room in front of you.
|
| Yes, I way too often don't do that, either. But if there's
| something in the road ahead of me, and I hit it? Man, there
| are few scenarios where I can claim that there was nothing
| I could do. And in the case of a full-sized vehicle in
| front of me, I don't care how erratically it's driving,
| don't run into the back of it.
| flerchin wrote:
| If your system is objectively right, but also objectively
| causing accidents with humans. Well you won't fix the
| humans...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If your system is objectively right, but also
| objectively causing accidents with humans.
|
| It's not causing accidents in these cases. The humans
| are.
| bumby wrote:
| Right, but also imagine how traffic would be if everyone
| drove with the pre-requisite distance to do that. Can you
| imagine I-5 traffic if everyone had 10 car lengths
| between them?
|
| So while your statement isn't wrong, it's also not always
| pragmatic in the real world.
| jaktet wrote:
| I'm guessing an accident caused due to not leaving enough
| room to safely stop is going to cause a bit more traffic
| than the alternative
| bumby wrote:
| So you're saying we should all drive with a 10 car
| buffer, then?
|
| If not, then you already recognize the probability is
| less than 100%, so that has to be baked into your
| statement.
| mikestew wrote:
| _So you 're saying we should all drive with a 10 car
| buffer, then?_
|
| The only comments saying that are...yours. If your
| argument is so lacking that you need to argue in bad
| faith, perhaps it is best to not bother at all.
|
| Or perhaps you are not aware of the proper following
| distance (and therefore, part of the problem about which
| you complain). _Two_ car lengths (EDIT: _seconds_ , not
| car lengths; oops) is the general advice.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm just trying to understand exactly what they are
| advocating, because so many people seem to be making a
| dichotomous safety choice. It's not a simple model and my
| point is there are tradeoffs.
|
| > _Two car lengths is the general advice._
|
| No. It's speed, roadway, and car dependent. Two car
| lengths isn't even sufficient at 25mph let alone at
| 70mph.[1] Which all goes to show how poorly people tend
| to think about these things and quickly resort to overly
| simplified mental models.
|
| [1] https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august201
| 5/S1N_A...
| mikestew wrote:
| _No. It 's speed, roadway, and car dependent._
|
| Moreso that my post has a mistake: two _second_ following
| distance, not car lengths. Brain fart on my part;
| apologies for causing you to have to find a URL. But as
| general rules go, that increases the distance as speed
| goes up. No, it doesn't account for everything, but good
| enough for most circumstances.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Of course it's pragmatic. Free-flowing traffic at 50mph
| beats people zooming up to 70mph then braking, then
| zooming again. Freeflowing traffic at 50mph annihilates
| traffic from accidents.
| sidlls wrote:
| Traffic is rarely "free flowing" at any speed on these
| kinds of roads. Often I see "moving roadblocks": clumps
| of cars going around or just under the speed limit
| jockeying around each other, impeding other traffic from
| moving around them. So-called "defensive drivers" are
| often unpredictably overly cautious: I'd wager they are
| at least an indirect cause of accidents quite often, but
| are severely under-represented in the statistics (if/when
| they're represented at all).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Often I see "moving roadblocks": clumps of cars going
| around or just under the speed limit jockeying around
| each other, impeding other traffic from moving around
| them.
|
| Indeed - this is the 70mph is slower than 50mph thing I
| mention.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I don't know what I-5 traffic is like, and kind of weird
| that you would refer to a local road on a global forum,
| but I'll assume it's like the M25.
|
| Roads like that are currently operating at bursting
| point. There are incidents and accidents every single day
| and constant police presence is required to unblock them.
| If you alleviate congestion, more people use the road.
| They just go back to bursting point. In other words, it's
| utterly insane.
|
| Can you imagine if there were accidents on railways or in
| the air every day? Imagine the scandal if train operators
| were found to be unsafely squeezing more trains on to the
| line that it could handle. Roads are stressful,
| inefficient and shit. Enforcing a safe stopping distance
| and pricing journeys accordingly, like trains, is where
| we want to be.
| bumby wrote:
| I-5 is a notoriously congested interstate in California.
| I don't live in California anymore, but used it simply
| because there are a disproportionate number of
| Californians on HN.
|
| I don't disagree about "pricing journeys accordingly,"
| but there are many reasons why this is difficult in
| practice in the US. Going through those points is a bit
| of a digression from my main point. Namely, that there
| are pragmatic tradeoffs that have to be considered. I'm
| consistently taken aback by the amount of "simple"
| solutions people advocate on HN and sometimes I wonder if
| it's due to software developers constantly working with
| the abstract rather than the concrete.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| "Can you imagine how bad traffic would be if everyone
| drove safely?" is a hell of a take.
| bumby wrote:
| So is "can you imagine how much infrastructure would cost
| to ensure everyone drove completely safely"
|
| Like most real-world engineering, there is a cost-benefit
| balance. Could we design an interstate highway system
| that allows everyone a 10 car buffer? Sure. Would we like
| how much it costs, the effects on the environment, etc.?
| Probably not.
|
| As an aside, your comment seems to go against HN
| guidelines by taking the least charitable interpretation
| of the comment.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Most traffic is not caused by sheer volume - this is well
| studied. It is often caused by inability to maneuver,
| merge, etc. As a result, your i-5 traffic would likely be
| much much better if everyone left 10 car lengths.
|
| You do not have to raise the average speed of travel very
| much to make up the theoretical loss due to increased
| spacing
| bluGill wrote:
| This is why cars do not scale: by the time traffic slows
| down there are 5-6 times more cars in the lane than it
| can safely handle. So by the time people are asking for
| "one more lane" they really mean 6 times as many lanes, a
| regular 4 lane highway needs 20 more lanes!
|
| Moral: support public transit.
| sib wrote:
| I remember taking Driver's Ed class many years ago. When
| we got to the section about fault in relation to rear-end
| collisions, the instructor said, "if you rear-end
| someone, it is your fault, full stop." The class then
| spent five minutes asking hypotheticals, to which the
| answer was always, "nope, still your fault."
| ghaff wrote:
| That is correct. However, it's also the case that in the
| real world if you drive legally but do things like brake
| erratically, you will cause accidents.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Not if the vehicles behind you are self driving cars.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| He's wrong. What if that car ahead just got there and is
| moving far below your velocity? And there's the case of
| where the car ahead stopped in a fashion a car can't--ran
| into something massive or the like. Under standard
| driving conditions if the car in front of you is involved
| in a head-on at speed you're going to hit it. 2 second
| following distance assumes the car ahead is subject to
| the same physics you are.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you cannot see a car ahead of you in time to stop then
| you are going too fast for conditions.
|
| The only time it can be not your fault is if the slow
| moving car switches lanes in front of you before there is
| time to stop.
| sib wrote:
| The one exception is if a car pulls into a lane in front
| of you when you are traveling faster.
|
| His actual statement was, "if you rear-end someone that
| you are following, it is your fault..."
|
| If someone abruptly pulls in front of you, you weren't
| following them.
| rickydroll wrote:
| I have a couple more scenarios for you. Overdriving your
| headlights is a great way to hit something you don't see
| in time. The safe speed in average conditions on low
| beams is around 25 to 30 mph, and on high beams, it is
| around 45 to 50 mph. If there's any glare on the roadway
| from security lights and oncoming drivers, your safe
| speed drops 10 to 20 miles an hour.
|
| Related to this is glare from the sun or artificial
| sources. I lived in a small city with antique-style globe
| lamps on Main Street. The veiling glare made pedestrians
| invisible, and even if you knew about the glare and
| watched for pedestrians, you would still be surprised
| when they became visible halfway across the street in
| front of you.
| danans wrote:
| > Before jumping to conclusions, are we sure these Waymos
| hit from behind didn't awkwardly and randomly stop in the
| middle of a busy intersection (where no sane human driver
| would)?
|
| I'm nearly certain that I'm alive today because I drove as
| defensively as something like a Waymo. One day as I was
| approaching an intersection where I had a green light, I
| saw a car approaching the same intersection from the cross
| street at a speed that they couldn't have possibly stopped
| for their red light.
|
| I instinctively slowed down suddenly and that car, as I
| predicted , ran the red light at high speed and turned just
| a few yards in front of me.
|
| If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker out,
| I might not have seen it or reacted in time. A fully
| autonomous and defensive driving system wouldn't get tired
| or hasty, and lidar can see fine at night.
|
| And yes, I might have gotten rear ended, but that's a far
| better outcome than getting t-boned by a car going 65mph.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >If I had been more tired, hasty, or it had been darker
| out, I might not have seen it or reacted in time.
|
| If you had just been an average driver. Most people are
| _terrible_ at defensive driving.
| danans wrote:
| > Most people are terrible at defensive driving.
|
| Mostly because people misunderstand what defensive
| driving means.
|
| It doesn't mean "go slow". It means always maintain a
| safety margin between your vehicle and others, adjusted
| for speed, road/weather conditions, and relative
| direction of travel.
|
| Those are the kinds of objectives a self driving system
| can very reliably achieve, unlike a human.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I agree and I wouldn't hold them against Waymo, but I think
| when you are developing a self driving car, you should stop
| analysing it like a crash between two humans with fault and
| blame, and start looking at it like a system.
|
| If Waymos were having a seriously increased rate of non-fault
| crashes, that would still be a safety issue, even if every
| crash was ultimately a human's fault.
| nlh wrote:
| Agreed. I think their current performance is super
| impressive. I think it's possible to get even better and
| beat humans by lowering the number of not-at-fault
| incidents too (although there are only so many variables in
| Waymo's control).
|
| As another commenter mentioned, the fact that the Waymo
| detected that a vehicle was approaching it from behind at
| high speed and tried to accelerate to get out of the way is
| super impressive, and I'm not sure even most good human
| drivers would have been able to do that.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. We had an autonomous bus here--involved in an
| accident the very first day that wouldn't have happened
| with a human driver. The bus just sat there and let a truck
| back into it.
|
| I also wonder how it fares in a Kobayashi Maru scenario. I
| chose to cream a construction cone because the guy in the
| left turn lane went straight. (Admittedly, I think he
| didn't realize he was in the left turn lane.) I could see
| the cone wasn't actually protecting anything, could a car
| do so?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Bad drivers are reality. If waymo drives in a way that leads
| to more crashes, even if theyre not its fault, its clear to
| me that it still deserves some responsibility for not
| following expected road etiquette.
| bluGill wrote:
| If Waymo is driving is the way safety engineers are trying
| to get everyone else to drive, then we should encourage it.
| There are some things where what everyone else does is
| wrong. (see the zipper merge)
| xnx wrote:
| These are a good examples of the self-reproach Waymo is
| exhibiting. Contrast to Cruise which appears to have
| attempted to suppress information about dragging a pedestrian
| under one of its cars.
| dataflow wrote:
| I feel like that doesn't paint the whole picture. I'm guessing
| incidents like [1] don't make it into those stats:
|
| > The safety driver unwittingly turned off the car's self-
| driving software by touching the gas pedal. He failed to assume
| control of the steering wheel, and the Pacifica crashed into
| the highway median.
|
| Why are these not counted? Are they really looking at their
| _car_ crashes, or just autonomous driving software _being in
| control_ during those car crashes?
|
| Maybe they want to argue the _software_ is safe, but that doesn
| 't change the fact that I'd still be scared of getting into
| that _car_.
|
| [1] https://qz.com/1410928/waymos-self-driving-car-crashed-
| becau...
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I believe these stats only cover the miles where there was no
| safety driver.
| 5- wrote:
| i.e., every accident where a split second before the
| collision the control system yields control to the safety
| driver is not accounted for in these stats?
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Waymo is not Tesla, they're actually building self-
| driving cars.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| This seems like an argument that you should be more worried
| about getting in a Waymo if there _is_ a safety driver than
| if there _isn 't_. If so, that would definitely be an
| interesting conclusion.
| dataflow wrote:
| Well both would be worrying, maybe one less than the other.
| Really I'd rather have a safe car where the failure modes
| are not stupid, so I can stop worrying altogether.
| solveit wrote:
| Sure, but the failure modes of the traditional human-
| controlled car are _incredibly_ stupid, we 've just
| gotten used to it.
| danans wrote:
| > Maybe they want to argue the software is safe, but that
| doesn't change the fact that I'd still be scared of getting
| into that car.
|
| As a rider, you can't touch the Waymo steering wheel or
| pedals, which eliminates the cause of the accident you
| referenced.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is very much a by-product of the current regulations
| that, AFAIK, mandate that a human driver should be able to
| take control at all times.
|
| That might make sense but this is obviously a little tricky
| to implement safely.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Apparently Waymo is aiming for SAE level 4, so ultimately
| they should get past that issue I guess (since the lack of
| the "human must be ready to take over at any moment"
| requirement is pretty much the point of... what is it, SAE
| 3 and over?) But yeah, for testing, the challenge
| remains...
|
| It would be interesting to know how often humans have to
| take over from Waymo, and also how often humans who've
| taken over from Waymo get into accidents.
|
| I mean, it is not really realistic, but hypothetically one
| could imagine a driving strategy that has a low expected
| number of crashes, but puts the car in an easily
| detectable, strategically bad position, and then just dumps
| that position on the safety driver. Of course I'm sure
| Waymo wouldn't do anything like that because it is, like,
| the most obvious bad-faith strategy which would be caught
| on a rigorous review and would be ruinous for the company.
| MattRix wrote:
| The driver fell asleep and then pressed the gas pedal... and
| didn't see or hear tons of warnings and alarms from the car.
| Very hard to blame that on the car.
| bumby wrote:
| There is no standardized way of collecting safety data. Each
| company is able to define their own standards on what is an
| AV-caused accident, the training conditions, etc.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| This is the bigger issue.
|
| I do not trust any data in 2023, and 2024 will be worse.
| bumby wrote:
| We can create frameworks to mitigate this problem,
| though. A good first step is better transparency
| regarding data reporting of AVs.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Having ridden in many a taxi, Uber Lyft, etc. over the years
| all driven by humans.... I'd be lying to say I'd be more
| afraid to get in a Waymo car.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I took a London black cab recently for a trip to the
| hospital, and the driver at one point overtook about 200
| metres of stationary traffic, going around several "keep
| left" bollards, to go through the red light that the rest
| of the traffic was queuing for. The driver was in his 70s,
| so I'm not sure if he's just been doing it so long that he
| doesn't care about the rules any more, or if he was
| struggling with some kind of age-related brain
| degenaration.
|
| In his defence, I did get to the hospital well in advance
| of my appointment. It reminded me of the old Sega game
| Crazy Taxi.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| IIRC, it is almost impossible to give a taxi cab driver a
| ticket in London.
| sib wrote:
| I recently took a Waymo test ride (round trip, two separate
| segments) in Los Angeles.
|
| It was extremely uneventful - in a good way - while
| navigating urban traffic, road construction, unprotected
| left turns, etc., and felt (subjectivity alert!) a lot
| safer than many of the rideshare drivers I've ridden with
| over the past 8 years in LA.
|
| I would definitely do it again and would feel safe putting
| a family member in one.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Maybe they want to argue the software is safe, but that
| doesn't change the fact that I'd still be scared of getting
| into that car.
|
| Why this car, and not all cars? If I fail to assume control
| of my steering wheel, I will also crash.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Why this car, and not all cars? If I fail to assume
| control of my steering wheel, I will also crash.
|
| The short answer is because this isn't a deterministic
| "if". The probability matters too.
|
| The thing is in a normal car you're forced to be alert all
| the time. With autonomous driving, 99%+ of the time you
| have nothing to do. Humans simply cannot pay as much
| attention all the time when they're not actively forced to.
| It's much easier to lose attention (drowsiness, chatting
| with people, etc.) than if you're physically already
| driving.
|
| And moreover, regaining control of a car requires some
| context switching time that isn't there when you're already
| in control.
|
| If my car is going to disengage and at a random point
| (whether due to my fault or otherwise), I'd rather just be
| in control the whole time.
| fdr wrote:
| It seems like these accidents could have been prevented by
| humans driving cars with collision avoidance. I'm a big fan of
| this feature on my relatively late-model Subaru, which tends to
| come part-and-parcel with adaptive cruise control, which is
| also quite a positive change in experience driving.
|
| I recently rented an even later-model Malibu that only had
| collision warning auditory alert. Better than nothing, but I'm
| surprised cars are still made without automatic braking.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Or just human drivers leaving enough room to brake in.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Human drivers being poor at driving is why self-driving
| cars exist. See: driving under the influence, distracted
| driving, aggressive drivers.
| closewith wrote:
| > Better than nothing, but I'm surprised cars are still made
| without automatic braking.
|
| In the EU, at least, since May 2022, all new cars do have
| automatic emergency braking, along with intelligent speed
| assistance; alcohol interlock installation facilitation;
| driver drowsiness and attention warning; advanced driver
| distraction warning; emergency stop signal; reversing
| detection; and event data recorder ("black box").
|
| Other features like eCall - a built-in automated emergency
| call for assistance in a road accident - have been mandatory
| since March 2018.
| nightski wrote:
| Sigh, EU cares about your privacy until it doesn't. These
| are data collection and monitoring nightmares. Big brother
| here we come.
| closewith wrote:
| While I broadly agree with you, at least eCall contacts
| (via voice and data) the local State 112 emergency
| services and only self-activates in the case of a
| collision.
|
| That's far better than the situation in the US, where
| private services like Tesla, GM with OnStar, or Ford with
| "Sync with Emergency Assistance", which have no limits on
| data collection.
| masklinn wrote:
| > along with intelligent speed assistance
|
| Shame. I've never had it work really reliably in any car,
| it's a feel good but mostly shit. Even more so when it's
| not even hooked into cruise (many cars will provide a
| shortcut to copy the sign's speed into the cruise or speed
| limiter, but far from all of them).
| closewith wrote:
| Yeah, the systems I've used are dire.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| This tech is wonderful! Fun fact about the inclusion of this
| technology in automobiles sold in the US:
|
| The Obama administration (2015) was able to successfully
| negotiate with and convince most major car manufacturers to
| voluntarily agree to start making new cars with automatic
| emergency braking. Their agreement stipulated that all new
| cars must have it by 2022 [1]. But this negotiated agreement
| is why we started to see some new car models include it post
| 2015.
|
| The tl;dr is the Obama administration basically said "look,
| if y'all don't agree to these proposed minimal standards,
| we'll get congress to pass a law that is more strict. So the
| companies decided to take the agreement now to de-risk
| themselves from having to comply with potentially more
| stringent requirements in the future).
|
| [1]. https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-and-iihs-
| announc...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| AEB and friends also demonstrably reduced costs to
| insurance companies, who pushed some savings onto consumers
| to shape demand. My $28k brand new car has better insurance
| rates than my 2004 car because of all the additional safety
| and automation prevents enough incidents that would
| otherwise total the car.
| burntwater wrote:
| The auto-braking collision avoidance system on my 2023 Mazda
| CX-5 actually is exactly what caused my first collision in 20
| years. I was slowing down to avoid a car that was turning
| off, the auto-braking decided I wasn't slowing enough (or, I
| might have just let go of the brake) and it proceeded to slam
| on the brakes bringing me to a full stop on a busy road,
| leading to me being rear-ended. At no time was any of that
| necessary. I've also had the auto-braking engage (on multiple
| cars) because of random debris in the road, or seemingly no
| reason at all.
|
| Granted, I'm sure this will improve over time. But for the
| past 5ish years, all my experiences with auto-braking have
| been dangerously negative.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| The classical caveat of any fully automated system - it
| works well when everyone has it.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I've never driven a car with auto braking. I've been yapped
| at many a time for lane "departures" that were not lanes
| (concrete grooves on the highway being the primary culprit)
| and sometimes not even real (that "lane" is the shadow of a
| nearby power wire.) I've also seen the adaptive cruise
| control appear to fail once when two cars simultaneously
| changed into my lane, one from each side. It still had a
| moment it could have acted so I can't conclusively say it
| failed. It also fails to recognize cars with too great a
| speed difference.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Waymo getting hit from behind, which is the other driver's
| fault even if the Waymo acted "unexpectedly"._
|
| Yes, but...there is something else to be said here. One of the
| things we have evolved to do, without necessarily appreciating
| it, is to intuit the behavior of other humans through the
| theory-of-mind. If AVs consistent act "unexpectedly", this
| injects a lot more uncertainty into the system, especially when
| interacting with other humans.
|
| "Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that makes dealing
| with mentally ill people anxiety-producing. I don't think most
| of us would automatically want to share the roads with a bunch
| of mentally ill drivers, even if, statistically, they were
| better than neurotypical drivers. There's something to be said
| about these scenarios regarding trust being derived from
| understanding what someone else is likely thinking.
|
| Edit: the other aspect that needs to be said is that tech in
| society is governed by policy. People don't generally just
| accept policy based on statistical arguments. If you think that
| you can expect people to accept policies that allow AVs without
| addressing the trust issue, it might be a painful ride.
| closewith wrote:
| > I don't think most of us would automatically want to share
| the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if,
| statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers.
|
| I've got some bad news for you.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Is it that 1 in 5 adults in the US live with mental
| illness[1]?
|
| 1. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-
| illness
| sounds wrote:
| Try replacing "acting unexpectedly" in your thought process
| (which superficially I agree with) with the words "acting
| safely."
|
| It remains to be seen if autonomous driving systems are
| actually safe. But if the other driver does something that is
| safe, there's then an onus on the first driver to have
| accounted for that.
| bumby wrote:
| > _But if the other driver does something that is safe,
| there 's then an onus on the first driver to have accounted
| for that._
|
| I don't disagree, but in order for the first driver to
| "account" for the actions of the second, they have to have
| some reasonable ability to predict what that driver will
| do. That gets us back to the theory-of-mind question.
| taneq wrote:
| Are we still talking about a car getting rear ended
| because it braked? Because you're meant to leave enough
| room between you and the car in front to stop safely even
| if it unexpectedly brakes as hard as possible. Running
| into the back of a car in front of you (that didn't just
| pull out) is always your fault.
| bumby wrote:
| I think people are often missing point. Yes, in a rear
| end collision the fault is almost always the following
| driver. Having a framework for assigning liability is not
| the same as having a safety framework. Consider an AV
| that is consistently brake-checking those behind them due
| to nuisance alarms. Now I have a harder time predicting
| what the car in front of me is going to do. Is that a
| safer or less-safe scenario? Sure, I can mitigate it by
| giving more trailing distance, but now we've traded
| traffic flow/congestion for an equal level of safety.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > now we've traded traffic flow/congestion for an equal
| level of safety.
|
| If you don't maintain a safe following distance for your
| speed, you are the one creating the dangerous driving
| environment. Tailgating is worse for both traffic flow
| and safety.
| bumby wrote:
| This, again, gets to missing the point. If a
| disproportionate amount of cars are nuisance brake
| checking, it increases the level of uncertainty in
| driving behavior. I now have to overcompensate on average
| to maintain the same level of safety.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > I now have to overcompensate on average to maintain the
| same level of safety.
|
| Tailgating is bad, regardless of if people brake check or
| not. If automous vehicles are what it takes to get you to
| stop tailgating and follow at a safe distance, then that
| is just an added bonus.
| bumby wrote:
| There is no single definition of tailgaiting other than
| being able to not being able to stop at a reasonable
| distance. So it is impossible to declare what constitutes
| tailing, especially in the mixed case of human drivers
| and robot drivers (who have a reputation for nuisance
| braking).
|
| Why, for example, do you think trainers post "Student
| Driver" stickers on their cars? It's because it signals
| the driver may be more unpredictable and people (rightly)
| tend to give them wide berth. You're essentially
| advocating that everyone treat everyone else (and every
| robot) as a student driver. That's fine for a dichotomous
| safety mindset, but other people would prefer to
| recognize the tradeoffs with that approach.
|
| Or maybe you're just deliberately bent on
| misunderstanding my point, I can't read your mind :)
| shkkmo wrote:
| > There is no single definition of tailgaiting other than
| being able to not being able to stop at a reasonable
| distance. So it is impossible to declare what constitutes
| tailing, especially in the mixed case of human drivers
| and robot drivers (who have a reputation for nuisance
| braking).
|
| What is this nonsense? The safe following distance is
| determined by how fast you can stop, not by who is
| driving the vehicle you are following.
|
| > Why, for example, do you think trainers post "Student
| Driver" stickers on their cars? It's because it signals
| the driver may be more unpredictable.
|
| No, it signals they have less experience and are more
| dangerous drivers. When it comes to driver
| predictability, student drivers tend to be far more
| predictable than the adult, overconfident drivers. I've
| never seen a student driver roaring past me in stopped
| traffic on a shoulder, or floor the gas to pass me
| through a light because they didn't want to turn in a
| turn only lane, or any of the other unpredictable things
| I see on a regular basis from experienced drivers.
|
| > You're essentially advocating that everyone treat
| everyone else (and every robot) as a student driver.
| That's fine for a dichotomous safety mindset, but other
| people would prefer to recognize the tradeoffs with that
| approach.
|
| I think that if more driver treated the people around
| them as student drivers, our roads would be a lot safer.
|
| I know that if people followed at a safe distance then we
| would have fewer traffic jams.
|
| Edit: You also seem stuck on the idea that Waymo unsafely
| unexpectedly brakes more often than human drivers, yet
| that isn't clear to me from the data we have. Indeed it
| seems like the opposite is true from the data.
| bumby wrote:
| > _The safe following distance is determined by how fast
| you can stop, not by who is driving the vehicle you are
| following._
|
| So when you're driving, do you somehow know the braking
| distance of every car and reaction time of every driver
| around you? You don't, and since their braking distance
| is needed to know your own braking requirements, you have
| to use heuristics. Maybe your heuristic is "assume
| everyone will cram on the brake, full tilt, at any time."
| But, that is not a pragmatic solution given our current
| infrastructure. We don't have the road capacity for
| everyone to drive that way. So we make tradeoffs. Part of
| that tradeoff means anticipating what other drivers will
| do and adjusting accordingly. Naturally, this will trade
| some safety for other things we value. That is the
| reality of the world we live in. You seem to be
| advocating for something else. The OP was that we might
| struggle to apply such heuristics without a theory of
| mind to guide us.
|
| We probably just disagree on the student driver vs.
| overconfident drivers. I feel like I'm pretty good at
| anticipating aggressive drivers, and I fear them must
| less than the super-tentative driver that tends to put
| other people at risk. But unless you have data, we're
| just talking about subjective opinion here so it's not
| really worth delving into further.
|
| > _I think that if more driver treated the people around
| them as student drivers, our roads would be a lot safer._
|
| Sure. But again, it doesn't really fit with the world we
| live in. Should we all, in general, drive more
| defensively? Sure. But I doubt our infrastructure will
| allow for 25+ car lengths between vehicles that the NHTSA
| recommends, so we're stuck making some tradeoffs.
|
| I agree on the data point. I'm not making strong claims
| about safety. I'm making claims about uncertainty. One
| thing that is clear (and I've advocated elsewhere) is
| that we don't have good data (in part, because companies
| get to share only what they want in many cases), which
| makes uncertainty greater.
| zehaeva wrote:
| To add onto the sibling's point, the "safe following
| distance" has a rule of thumb of "3 seconds behind". At
| 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately
| 300 feet.
|
| I'm willing to bet that's around 10 times what you were
| considering as a safe following distance in your head,
| and probably still 5 times more than what you were
| picturing for the safe distance behind a brake checking
| AV.
| strangattractor wrote:
| The rules for every vehicle I have ever operated on land,
| air and water require the overtaking vehicle to maintain
| separation.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm not sure this is the blanket case. Hot air balloons,
| for example, get right-of-way regardless, on the
| assumption they have less maneuverability. Weird edge
| case, I know, but just throwing it out there to
| underscore the danger of absolute statements.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I have to admit I have not piloted a ballon but even a
| sailing vessel over taking a power boat has to avoid the
| vessel in front. I would also question the rationality of
| operating an aircraft you cannot steer:)
| mannykannot wrote:
| This discussion appears to have run off the road with an
| unexpected turn.
| ang_cire wrote:
| But who gets the right of way between 2 hot air balloons?
|
| Funny story, I actually "crashed" in a hot air balloon as
| a kid, when the hill we were landing on had a draft
| running up over it that caught the balloon after the
| basket had touched down, and dragged us along the ground
| sideways for a good quarter mile.
| bumby wrote:
| Haha well in that case, I'd say the ground had right-of-
| way :-)
| shagie wrote:
| If I recall correctly, the lower one has right of way
| because visibility from lower to higher is blocked
| compared to higher to lower. It is easier for the one
| further up in the air column to spot and react to the
| lower one. Going up is also likely a less dangerous
| proposition than going down.
|
| This is half remembered from a Snowmass balloon rally
| conversation.
| mannykannot wrote:
| None of these three cases involved the Waymo car behaving
| in ways that are not that uncommon among human drivers,
| and our theory of mind does not make us nearly-infallible
| predictors of what another driver is going to do. Your
| objection becomes essentially hypothetical unless these
| cars are behaving in ways that are both outside of the
| norms established by the driving public, and dangerous.
| bumby wrote:
| That's true, but also one of the selling points of some
| AI tasks. As a non hypothetical example, the DoD hired a
| company to train a software dogfighting simulator with
| RL. What surprised the pilots was how many "best
| practices" it broke and how it essentially behaved like a
| pilot with a death wish. Possibly good in war, maybe not
| so good on a public road.
| strangattractor wrote:
| From the article : "But it's not enough to answer the most
| important safety question: whether Waymo's technology makes
| fatal crashes less likely."
|
| Wouldn't the most important safety question be "whether
| Waymo's technology makes fatal crashes MORE likely?" Why
| assume Autonomous Vehicles have to perform better?
|
| Waymo less fatalities == Win
|
| Waymo same fatalities == Draw
|
| Waymo more fatalities == Bad Waymo
| nkingsy wrote:
| because everyone thinks they're above average. If you're
| only better than the below average drivers, then everyone
| will think they're better off driving themselves even if
| that's not true.
|
| Also, we've accepted and made legal frameworks around the
| concept that people sometimes kill each other with cars.
| Robots killing people with cars does not benefit from
| this carve out.
| strangattractor wrote:
| It is only a matter of time before that changes.
| notahacker wrote:
| Status quo fatalities == Bad humans
|
| A significant proportion of the current fatal accident
| rate is based on incidents which involve driving so bad
| that humans implicated are severely punished for it, or
| at least banned from driving for a period.
|
| Why would anyone set the benchmark for a commercial
| driving company lower?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. The comparison should be to drivers who were
| properly licensed and not DUI, not to all incidents.
| spaced-out wrote:
| I disagree. Some people will drunk drive no matter the
| legal consequences, or in my case, I once rear-ended
| someone because I was drowsy but kept driving because I
| wanted to get home (fortunately no one was hurt, and yes,
| the accident was completely my fault). The comparison
| should be against the general population of human drivers
| because that's the reality on the road.
| lukas099 wrote:
| You're right. Also, if AI drivers are safer, there will be
| knock-on effects of making humans drive more safely as
| well.
| rudasn wrote:
| For sure. As a driver, one of my main inputs is the other
| drivers overall driving behaviour that I'm aware of.
|
| A good indicator of their next move is their previous move.
| uluyol wrote:
| I don't think this applies to any of the incidents mentioned
| in the article.
| __loam wrote:
| In fact, if you don't have enough room to react to
| "unexpected" behavior, you are at fault lol.
| trgn wrote:
| When a human driver must emergency break for a downed
| branch, it'd ok. When an AI does it, it's unexpected and
| needs to be hyperanalyzed. I swear, the trolley-car
| problem is absurd, it's poisoned all debate. 99% of
| crashes is people not being able to stop in time because
| people don't drive defensively and can't stop in time
| when they are called to do so.
| bumby wrote:
| > _it 's unexpected and needs to be hyperanalyzed_
|
| There's a good reason for this. It's because the human
| can be interrogated into what was going through their
| mind whereas many ML models cannot. That means we can't
| ascertain if the ML accident is part of a latent issue
| that may rear its ugly head again (or in a slightly
| different manner) or just a one-off. That is the original
| point: a theory-of-mind is important to risk management.
| That means we will struggle to mitigate the risk if we
| don't "hyperanalyze" it.
| shagie wrote:
| Cory Doctorow - Car Wars https://web.archive.org/web/2017
| 0301224942/http://this.deaki...
|
| (Linking to the web.archive version because the graphics
| are better / more understandable when in the context of
| some of the text)
|
| Chapter 6 is the most relevant here, but it's all a
| thought provoking story.
| parineum wrote:
| You're missing the context. The AI didn't actually do
| anything unexpected, unless you expected it to try and
| drive through a downed branch. The AI behaved exactly as
| it should. The unexpected part was when the car behind
| the AI didn't see the branch and, therefore, didn't
| expect the AI car in front to stop. Unexpected doesn't
| mean wrong.
|
| Cars can do unexpected things for good reasons, as the AI
| did in this case.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm taking in a larger context. I think just reading the
| three cited examples is an incorrect approach. For one,
| Waymo isn't sharing "all" their data, they've already
| been highlighted for bad practices in terms of only
| sharing the data from when their Waymo team decided was a
| bad decision. That's not necessarily objective, and can
| also lead to perverse incentives to obfuscate. So we
| don't have a great set of data to work with, because the
| data sharing requirements have not been well-defined or
| standardized. Secondly, if you look at reports of other
| accidents, you can see where AV developers have heinously
| poor practices as it relates to safety-critical software.
| Delaying actions as a mitigation for nuisance braking is
| really, really bad idea when you are delaying a
| potentially safety critical action. I'm not saying Waymo
| is bad in this regard, but we know other AV developers
| are and, when you combine that with the lack of
| confidence in the data and the previous questionable
| decisions around transparency, it should raise some
| questions.
| adwn wrote:
| Braking to avoid hitting an obstacle (like that tree branch
| in the first example) is hardly "acting unexpectedly".
|
| > _" Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that makes
| dealing with mentally ill people anxiety-producing._
|
| Wat.
| bumby wrote:
| But this certainly could be construed as unexpected:
|
| > _" In August, a Waymo at an intersection "began to
| proceed forward" but then "slowed to a stop" and was hit
| from behind by an SUV."_
|
| > _" Wat."_
|
| Are you saying you don't understand why unexpected behavior
| causes anxiety? It's a pretty well documented effect, from
| rats to humans.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It was:
|
| > > "Acting unexpectedly" is one of the aspects that
| makes dealing with mentally ill people anxiety-producing.
|
| > Wat.
|
| The "Wat" probably refers to the fact that this seems
| unrelated. Dealing with mentally ill people is anxiety-
| inducing because they act unexpectedly... so what? Lots
| of things are unexpected. They shouldn't all be drawn
| into the analogy that says "well, that thing, plus a load
| of other things, can induce anxiety, therefore that thing
| should be tarnished with the same brush as all of those
| things."
|
| People drive in unexpected ways all the time. Of all the
| criticisms to level at them, "the thing you're doing plus
| a load of other stuff can induce anxiety" probably isn't
| top of the list.
| bumby wrote:
| I am not painting them with the same brush, I'm drawing
| an analogy to help people understand the context better.
| In this case, public policy will dictate to what extent
| AVs are allowed on public roadways. That, in turn, is
| dictated by trust. I'm pointing out that "trust" may be
| incompatible with "unpredictability." I'm not sure what
| throughline you're drawing, but you seem overly hung up
| on the use of the word "anxiety," and it's causing you to
| miss the real point.
|
| So to put a finer point on it, people need to acknowledge
| that public trust is necessary to wide-scale adoption of
| AV tech. Plenty of psychological research shows how we
| aren't intuitively wired to understand statistics. So all
| the bleating about statistics may be necessary, but not
| sufficient, to get wide-scale adoption of AVs on public
| roadways.
| billnad wrote:
| This makes me think of people that change two lanes very
| quickly to be able to turn at that next corner. We all
| see them, they piss us off through their bad planning but
| in the end I don't think an autonomous vehicle would ever
| try this, depending on programming of course.
|
| Would also be nice to see all incidents, not just injury
| incidents to see what kind of unexpected "mistakes" these
| cars are making
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It shouldn't, simply because it always knows where it's
| going well ahead of the lane change.
| sevagh wrote:
| >Dealing with mentally ill people is anxiety-inducing
| because they act unexpectedly... so what? Lots of things
| are unexpected.
|
| I think you're understating it.
|
| Mentally ill people act far off the cuff. If I'm walking
| outside, people can behave unexpectedly (but within the
| parameters of behavior that doesn't make me anxious).
|
| Imagine: stopping instantly to bend over and tie one's
| shoes or to look at a storefront. Taking up multiple
| spaces on the sidewalk. Dropping an item that causes a
| loud noise. All of these are unexpected movements that
| require a reaction.
|
| However, if somebody screams about CIA conspiracies or
| has very erratic mannerisms, that would create more
| anxiety.
|
| So, apparently their point is that AI behavior on the
| roads might be more jarring than normal jackass human
| behavior on the roads.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Are you saying you don 't understand why unexpected
| behavior causes anxiety? It's a pretty well documented
| effect, from rats to humans._
|
| I'm saying that your leap from "the car in front is
| behaving unexpectedly because you don't have all the
| information it has" to "a bunch of mentally ill drivers"
| is such a complete non-sequitur that it's deserving of a
| Wat [1].
|
| [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
| bumby wrote:
| I understand how you could miss it, but the sequiter is
| "unexpected behavior".
|
| Why do mentally ill people cause some people anxiety?
| Because they may behave erratically.* In other words, we
| have a lot more difficulty ascertaining what they are
| thinking, and by extension, predicting their behavior.
| The same can be said for the general public sentiment
| towards AVs.
|
| * I also understand "mental illness" is a blanket
| category and I'm not using it as a stigmatizing term. It
| may be stretching the analogy too much, but it's simply a
| proxy for "I have a hard time predicting what's going
| through this persons mind"
| toast0 wrote:
| > Braking to avoid hitting an obstacle (like that tree
| branch in the first example) is hardly "acting
| unexpectedly".
|
| Depends on the size of the tree branch.
|
| But also, being hit from behind at low speeds was a pretty
| common thing in early testing in Mountain View, when they
| were using the Google name on cars. That there are only a
| handful of incidents reported in this report means either
| the software has gotten better at communicating its intent
| to other drivers, or the driving public is aware that Waymo
| cars are way more cautious --- if they only make lane
| changes and unprotected turns by engraved invitation and
| everyone knows it, that's fine too.
|
| In the early days, it seemed like it might be appropriate
| to install a 1979 regulation 5 mph rear bumper on these
| cars, because they'd likely get hit often enough.
| bumby wrote:
| > _this report means either the software has gotten
| better at communicating its intent to other drivers, or
| the driving public is aware that Waymo cars are way more
| cautious_
|
| There's at least one other alternative: selection bias.
| Since there is no standard industry definition, companies
| are allowed to not report many incidents.
|
| > _" Waymo, on the other hand, ran complex computer
| simulations after each disengagement, and only reported
| to the DMV those where it believed the driver was correct
| to take charge, rather than being overly cautious."_[1]
|
| So it may not be reported unless it meets Waymo's (non-
| independent) selection criteria. I think most people can
| at least recognize there is a potential conflict of
| interest when objective reporting isn't required.
|
| [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/have-selfdriving-cars-
| stopped-gett...
| ghaff wrote:
| >Depends on the size of the tree branch.
|
| Our thinking fast reflexes are to pretty much avoid any
| obstacle whether living or dead. Hopefully our thinking
| slow brain has time to do a proper evaluation before
| doing anything drastic.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Breaking for a tree branch of any size seems preferable
| to running into highway barriers[1] and fire trucks[2].
|
| [1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11801138/apple-engineer-
| killed-in-...
|
| [2] https://abc7news.com/tesla-autopilot-crash-driver-
| assist-cra...
| toast0 wrote:
| Not for a branch that's 2 inches long and a fraction of
| an inch in diameter.
| seandoe wrote:
| I would imagine that, with more experience, anticipating the
| (more consistent) actions of a machine would be easier than
| anticipating the actions of an unknown human in an unknown
| state.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The entire point of this line of discussion is that an ML
| based system with extremely weird and unexpected failure
| conditions and failure states ISN'T "more consistent" than
| a human who might follow more closely than physics says but
| otherwise is ACTUALLY predictable because they have a mind
| that we have evolved to predict.
|
| ML having completely unpredictable failure modes is like
| the entire case against putting them anywhere. What would
| you call a vision system that mis-identifies a stop sigh
| because of a couple unrelated lines painted on it, other
| than "unpredictable"?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Quite frankly, the vehicle in front of you is allowed to stop
| at any time for any reason (legally and practically, as front
| vehicle has better visibility on road conditions than
| follower), and it is always incumbent upon the driver to the
| rear to leave room.
|
| If humans can't do that, the solution is probably _more_
| automation.
| bumby wrote:
| Has the nuisance braking problem been completetly solved?
| If not, I don't know that I'd agree that more automation is
| necessarily the answer. More _good_ automation, maybe, but
| there 's a logical jump there.
|
| The Uber fatality from years back showed that the software
| used "action suppression" to mitigate nuisance braking. The
| idea that that would be acceptable on a safety-critical
| software application should give us pause to consider that
| more automation is the knee-jerk solution.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "Nuisance braking" is, like jaywalking, a phrase that
| prioritizes one party's use of the road over another
| party's. The best policy is still to leave the vehicle in
| front enough room to brake for _any reason._ Mostly
| because "nuisance braking" hasn't been solved in
| _humans_ either (ever been behind someone who panicked
| when they realized they were falling asleep behind the
| wheel? I have.)
| Justsignedup wrote:
| > I don't think most of us would automatically want to share
| the roads with a bunch of mentally ill drivers, even if,
| statistically, they were better than neurotypical drivers.
|
| I'm not scared of mentally ill drivers. I'm scared of rich 16
| year olds. I'm scared of drunk drivers. I'm scared of drivers
| sitting so low they can't see most of what is happening
| around them. I'm scared of drivers having seizures while
| driving (my mom was hit a while ago by a man who lost his
| license due to seizures, and still refused to stop driving).
| I'm scared of drivers who drive without a license because
| "fuck them, I drive when I want to". I'm scared of people
| mixing up gas and break pedals (just got hit by one), in cars
| which can go 0-60 in 2.6 seconds weighing 6000lbs.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I'm scared of people mixing up gas and break pedals
|
| This specific problem is just as much a design flaw as it
| is a PEBCAC issue.
|
| You have two very similar pedals that perform polar
| opposite functions right next to each other, and they are
| both operated by the same foot.
|
| I'm surprised this isn't a bigger problem.
| bumby wrote:
| I had to look up the 'PEBKAC' acronym, but I think you
| allude to the problem of human factors engineering. It's
| commonplace in aerospace, where safety-critical, time-
| sensitive decisions must be made, and humans are in the
| loop. I would extend this to autonomous driving systems,
| particularly when you expand the system boundaries beyond
| the car itself. Humans are part of that human-car-
| environment system, whether as pedestrians, passengers,
| or other drivers and we should give them consideration.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| an average of 44 per day in the US. So... common, but
| relatively, uncommon. And apparently there is software
| that can help mitigate this.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Ordinary neurotypical drivers act "unexpectedly" on the road
| all the time. I know that I would brake if I saw a downed
| branch. And people do much much much more. Suddenly change
| lanes on the highway with no signaling? Check. Brake suddenly
| because you almost missed your turn without looking to see if
| anybody was following close behind? Check. Drive over non-
| lane portions of the road because you were late seeing your
| highway exit? Check. Swerve suddenly because you dropped your
| phone between the seats while texting? Check.
|
| I've seen people _reverse_ up a highway onramp.
| wddkcs wrote:
| I think both points are true- people act unexpectedly all
| the time, so much so that we've come to expect the
| unexpected, by the sophistication of our theory of mind. I
| live in a city where erratic driving is commonplace, but
| that's in relation to the legal norms. New local norms
| become accepted, which you can anticipate once you adapt.
| Some of these 'norms' are handy time savers, others are
| incredibly dangerous and result in frequent accidents, but
| persist anyway.
|
| How will AI drivers navigate these 'cultural' differences?
| Will they insist on following the letter of the law
| (presumably, for liability) or will they adapt to local
| practices and potentially lower their overall collision
| rate with humans driving poorly. Interesting near term
| question.
| waythenewsgoes wrote:
| Others may not necessarily agree, but at least anecdotally, a
| sizeable portion of drivers I see make all kinds of mistakes
| (law of averages dictates more of them are so called
| "neurotypical" than not no?).
|
| "Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual
| laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive
| driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the
| intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the
| law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still
| gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?
| lukas099 wrote:
| My wife gets triggered every time I drive 'only' the speed
| limit.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Driving the speed limit with people whizzing past you is
| more dangerous than following the speed of everyone
| around you.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Humans are nothing if not adaptable. We will adjust our
| expectations.
| dsizzle wrote:
| All this focus on Waymo supposedly acting "unexpectedly" but I
| don't see that word in the original article, and the statistics
| here implies the opposite -- Waymo gets in fewer accidents
| overall!
|
| Also, only the 2nd item is even consistent with Waymo behaving
| unexpectedly (we're not given enough info to know why it
| stopped). In the first item, the "unexpected" thing is the
| branch, not the behavior (stopping), and in the third Waymo's
| behavior didn't contribute to the accident at all -- instead it
| nearly avoided it despite the other car's bad driving.
| raible wrote:
| Getting rear-ended is almost always the other driver's fault,
| but 7 years ago I was involved in a serious accident (minor
| injuries, both cars totaled) when the driver in the fast lane
| decided to pull over and pick up a hitchhiker. Crossed over two
| lanes, hard on the brakes, and I had no chance to even get off
| the gas.
|
| The responsibility was 100% his because of "an unsafe lane
| change".
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup, this is the primary case where the rear vehicle isn't at
| fault. You change lanes into a lane that's moving faster and
| get hit, you were wrong even if they hit you from behind.
| bluGill wrote:
| If it can be proven. 25 years ago a scam was where someone
| would suddenly change lanes to be rear ended like that,
| then claim "back pain" and sue for a lot of $$$. I don't
| know how common it was, but when there are not witnesses
| the courts tend to side with the person being rear ended.
| zirgs wrote:
| And this is why you should have a dashcam in your car.
| ajb wrote:
| So, how are they doing this when the public results for
| recognising pedestrians from images seem to be so rubbish? (Or at
| least, don't seem to have a sufficient number of nines precision
| for this purpose). Is it easier to recognise a pedestrian from
| LiDAR, or is everything just very precautionary?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I see this sentiment but I think there's a flawed, tacit
| assumption underlying it. Image classifiers might not be very
| good at calling out a presentation in a static photograph, but
| an AV doesn't need to classify objects to avoid striking them.
| For AV purposes, uncertainty about part of a scene is also a
| useful input.
| xnx wrote:
| Recognition is important for predicting future state. Detection
| is important (critical) avoiding hitting anything. Short of
| edge cases like a plastic bag blowing in the wind, self-driving
| cars really don't want to come in contact with anything they
| detect, even if they can't recognize what it is.
| skepticATX wrote:
| Comparing autonomous vehicles to the average driver is always
| going to be misleading.
|
| It's not fair to compare it to drunk drivers, or to the small
| portion of people (likely causing an oversized portion of
| accidents) who shouldn't have a license.
|
| I'd like to see these comparisons made against a typical good
| driver, who never drivers impaired and obeys the law.
| kranke155 wrote:
| What? How would you get that data? Look Waymo vs top 10% of
| drivers?
| olooney wrote:
| Benchmark against Taxi/Uber drivers?
| skepticATX wrote:
| Taking the top 10% of drivers would also be unfair, this time
| against AVs.
|
| I'm simply saying that factors unrelated to driving skill
| should be excluded. Things like being inebriated, purposely
| breaking driving laws, looking at a cell phone.
|
| The problem is that studies like these are used to imply that
| AVs are more skilled than humans at driving, but it's not a
| conclusion that can be drawn, because the AVs are operating
| optimally and some percentage of humans are operating
| suboptimally.
|
| What results like this actually show are that replacing _all_
| human drivers with AVs would likely result in less accidents
| (because by definition you're excluding people who are
| malicious), which is not the same thing as saying that AVs
| are more skilled at driving.
| ctoth wrote:
| > I'm simply saying that factors unrelated to driving skill
| should be excluded. Things like being inebriated, purposely
| breaking driving laws, looking at a cell phone.
|
| What is driving skill if not knowing not to do these
| things?
| kranke155 wrote:
| I don't think that would be a fair comparison because the
| whole idea behind these things is that humans operate
| suboptimally a LOT.
|
| Removing the mistakes from the human data makes the whole
| exercise futile. The whole idea is people fuck up. A lot.
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure that I agree. If
| humans sometimes drive impaired and Waymo never does, then that
| is a real safety point in favor of Waymo. Try as we might, we
| haven't been able to eliminate drunk driving by humans. If
| Waymo vehicles just don't have that failure mode, that's a
| meaningful improvement.
|
| Consider this: suppose that Waymo drives more safely than "US
| drivers overall" but slightly less safely than "US drivers who
| never drive impaired". Then... replacing a uniform slice of US
| drivers with Waymo vehicles still improves safety! It would
| only be problematic if you somehow adverse-selected by
| replacing "the safest" human drivers with Waymo but letting the
| most dangerous ones continue to drive by themselves. Which is
| interesting to consider, but I don't see why it would be the
| case.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| In fact, it could likely be that we end up with the opposite
| of your adversarial selection case. Studies have shown that
| dense cities with good public transit (or walkability) have
| lower DUI arrest rates. That could potentially extend to
| everywhere that Waymo is widely available and convenient.
| skepticATX wrote:
| > Try as we might, we haven't been able to eliminate drunk
| driving by humans
|
| I'm not sure that we've actually tried very hard. We could,
| say, mandate an ignition interlock device in every vehicle.
| Pretty draconian, sure, but outlawing human drivers would
| also be.
|
| Point being, if the problem with human drivers lies outside
| of some fundamental flaw, there are lots of solutions that
| can be explored beyond just self driving cars.
|
| For what it's worth, it's obvious that AVs will exceed human
| skill at some point. I just don't think we're there yet, and
| none of the data I've seen has swayed me.
| impulser_ wrote:
| A year ago, Elon Musk was saying Tesla was going to have a
| million robotaxis on the road by now. It wasn't even just him.
| Investors also were predicting this.
|
| But it looks like Google/Waymo is the only one with reliable self
| driving technology.
|
| If they don't give up like Google typically does. This could
| actually be a huge business for them.
|
| Everyone I know who has used the Waymo service had good things to
| say about it and we are just at the beginning.
|
| The FSD problem will become easily as you scale up due to the
| fact that these AI can easily communicate with all the cars
| around them unlike human drivers.
| danrl wrote:
| Have driven in Waymo and Cruise quite a hit. Don't wanna beat a
| dead horse, so let's talk about Waymo only: It improved every
| time from when I first got access to today, where a lot of
| people can use it now. I even had my visiting parents riding in
| Waymo cars a couple of times and they felt saved and loved it,
| and they are not really early adopters of anything :) When in
| SF I always prefer Waymo over any other form of ride service or
| ride share.
|
| Disclaimer: Google LLC employee. No relations to Waymo, just a
| fan of self driving in general.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > AI can easily communicate with all the cars around them
|
| As a long time anti-abuse engineer, I cannot agree. The game
| theoretic aspect of trusting data acquired from outside parties
| cannot be overcome. Cooperative AVs will never exist.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Even if the data is signed by a key in the secure enclave of
| the source?
| impulser_ wrote:
| They already do. Drones can cooperate between each other.
| xnx wrote:
| "Outside parties" is the key part. Cooperation between
| trusted agents is no problem. Everyone else could be an
| adversary.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > A year ago, Elon Musk was saying Tesla was going to have a
| million robotaxis on the road by now. It wasn't even just him.
| Investors also were predicting this.
|
| He's been saying that for a long time. I think it was 2017. "By
| 2019, it will be financially irresponsible not to own a Tesla."
| and that the average owner would be making $30K a year with
| their Tesla out taxiing when they weren't using the vehicle.
|
| Which should have been alarm bells for the bullshit meter for
| anyone with a room temperature IQ. "We've designed this money-
| printing machine. And rather than keeping all that money for
| ourselves, we're going to sell them all to you! (After we
| charge you $12,000 for it...)"
|
| And you know that if Robotaxi Tesla ever does actually appear,
| it will be another charge atop the FSD for _that_ software too.
|
| All it does is give me vibes of "Here's how you can get rich
| quick, like me: step 1, give me money to hear me tell you how
| people can get rich quick."
| superkuh wrote:
| And all of those miles are in the arid southwest in places that
| don't have winter. They don't really extrapolate to the rest of
| the country or world. SF + Arizona is easy mode for autonomous
| driving.
| boulos wrote:
| Winter and snow is hard for a lot of reasons. But we did some
| testing with safety drivers in NYC last year and will be in
| Buffalo this year:
| https://twitter.com/Waymo/status/1721629316625093035 (and
| others historically).
| superkuh wrote:
| Next time you should try in NYC and Buffalo (or Minneapolis)
| during winter. Doing it without snow like the twitter and
| blog post show doesn't change much. Good luck.
| boulos wrote:
| Sorry if I was unclear, that's what we did in NYC and are
| doing again in Buffalo. The blog post is actually from the
| previous Bellevue announcement.
|
| Edit to add this link to some footage: https://twitter.com/
| dmitri_dolgov/status/1489318507342807041
| superkuh wrote:
| Nice! That's the kind of research that's needed. Obscured
| roads with emergent lanes.
| kirse wrote:
| Ever think about partnering with ARA [1] (and/or Subaru) when
| it comes to winter/snow and inclement-condition driving?
| There are groups like Team O'Neil [2] up in NH that offer
| closed courses for challenging driving conditions, and it
| would likely be a cool marketing opportunity for Waymo.
|
| [1] https://www.americanrallyassociation.org/
|
| [2] https://teamoneil.com/
|
| I've always said that self-crashing cars will win my stamp of
| approval when they can compete in stage rally. It'd likely
| push the Waymo team to evolve even further by getting
| involved in something like that, even with just the basics.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Here in Finland we already have some autonomous public
| transportation buses running in my neighborhood. They're great!
| Can't wait for the day where they displace human drivers in all
| non-sporting arenas.
| superkuh wrote:
| How do they handle when the road markings and road edges are
| obscured during winter? How do they handle emergent lanes when
| it's actively snowing? I've never heard of a successful test,
| let alone deployment, of autonomous driving in a place that has
| winter. I'm very curious.
| standardUser wrote:
| Here is an article discussing the technology:
| https://www.laserfocusworld.com/test-measurement/test-
| measur...
|
| I'm not actually sure why everyone is so concerned about
| driving in winter conditions. What is the primary concern,
| other than sensors freezing? As a human driver, I find the
| biggest problem to be other human drivers who insist on
| driving fast even in winter weather. It seems like almost all
| of the complications could be avoided by _slowing down_.
| superkuh wrote:
| In winter sometimes the road markings aren't visible for
| weeks to months. In winter the lane positions are not
| absolute but emergent things that flocking humans create
| day to day by following each other. In winter the edges of
| ther oad are not straight, or absolute, but instead change
| from day to day and week to week. In winter, the road
| surface and road edges are made of the same material: snow.
| In winter it is slippery. And in winter sensors freeze and
| obscure, like you say.
|
| All of these are very _hard_ problems that aren 't quite
| addressed by a bus driving on cleared bare roads. It's good
| to see someone tried to work on them instead of just
| pretending all of earth is like SF. Too bad it seems to
| have failed.
| danans wrote:
| Looks like it is this:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nargessbanks/2019/03/15/muji-
| ga...
|
| However it appears the local company that made the autonomous
| driving system went bankrupt:
|
| https://truckandbusbuilder.com/article/2023/07/18/sensible-4.
| ..
|
| It makes you wonder how autonomous driving systems get
| supported after their maker's bankruptcy.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| That's the one. I didn't realize Muji went bankrupt, I
| thought they were a huge outfit.
| danans wrote:
| It was Sensible 4 that went bankrupt, not Muji.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Pretty well, I guess. There's plenty of snow outside my
| apartment and I'm still seeing them pass by every day, about
| every 20 minutes or so.
| superkuh wrote:
| Do they drive when the roads have a layer of packed on snow
| obscuring the markings and edges? Or do they just drive
| when the roads are clear and marked?
| nerdjon wrote:
| I sometimes get annoyed at how we talk about self driving cars,
| we shouldn't expect them to have a perfect track record. There
| will always be situations that neither choice is a good one but
| something has to happen.
|
| But to me, I often wonder about once this tech comes out what
| happens once theoretically all of the self driving cars can
| communicate with each other? So if you need to break suddenly,
| instead of just your car than its a series of cars that can do it
| together or example?
|
| I have been wondering if there has been any talk about a standard
| around doing this proposed since to me that is the true power of
| self driving cars, not just how do they operate with other
| unpredictable drivers.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I think no one wants to deal with the combined effort of
| standardization and anti abuse...
| MattRix wrote:
| That seems laegely unnecessary. Once you have mostly self
| driving cars on the road, there should be much fewer accidents
| and close calls because they will all be driving more
| cautiously and with proper spacing etc. On top of that, their
| awareness and reaction time will be so good that to an outside
| observer it will look like a chain of cars all stopping at once
| anyway.
|
| Then of course there are the issues with car-to-car
| communication. It would open up tons of opportunities for bugs,
| hacks, and other forms of abuse.
| darepublic wrote:
| I have seen the 'self driving cars dont have to be perfect,
| just better than idiot hoomans' strawman used to deflect
| attention away from the fact that IMO self driving cars aren't
| yet as good as the idiot hoomans. Because though they may have
| a stellar record, it's in the context of disengaging to let
| safety driver take over, in carefully controlled conditions
| etc. Basically companies using tricks to create the right stats
| for their splashy marketing.
|
| That said, if Waymo _can_ drive as safe as my the typical
| defensive human driver, without the need for any human driver
| to take over, then I would applaud it. Maybe it does, I only
| follow this news from a distance. We all know what happened
| with the Tesla hype but I'm more willing to give Waymo the
| benefit of the doubt. Waiting patiently for self driving cars
| to become available in my city.
| flutas wrote:
| > Basically companies using tricks to create the right stats
| for their splashy marketing.
|
| Yep, for instance: If the car gets confused and can't
| proceed, what is the outcome? Well it's not a "disengagement"
| or recorded as anything publicly. It's just "the car
| contacting support for directions."
|
| Wanna see how this plays out? Here's Cruise, bragging about
| reaching 1 disengagement per 96,000 miles[0], sounds
| impressive right? Meanwhile, in reality Cruise cars needed
| remote assistance every 4-5 miles[1].
|
| An even more fun fact? Cruise had at least 60 vehicles stall
| at once in 2022[2], but somehow they claim only "9
| disengagements."
|
| [0]: https://www.eetimes.com/waymo-cruise-dominate-av-
| testing/
|
| [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/06/cruise-confirms-
| robotaxis-re...
|
| [2]: https://jalopnik.com/cruise-server-crash-causes-self-
| driving...
| xnx wrote:
| Looking for the truth in statistics is very tricky.
| Important to note that Cruise is extremely different from
| Waymo and shouldn't be used to represent self-driving as a
| whole.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > it's in the context of disengaging to let safety driver
| take over, in carefully controlled conditions.
|
| There is no safety driver. This study is discussing the fully
| driverless level 4 autonomous vehicles that Waymo operates in
| California and Arizona.
|
| This particular study show that those vehicles had accident
| rates 3-9x lower than human drivers, even after controlling
| for the limitations on where they operate (such as not
| operating on highways).
| DevX101 wrote:
| I hear you but being slightly better than humans isn't going to
| cut it. Every accident that happens opens up the self driving
| company to massive liability. If I'm a bad driver and hit you,
| you can sue me for a few thousand dollars. If Google is a bad
| driver and hits you, you could sue them for tens of millions of
| dollars.
|
| If we made all cars self driving and they killed 30,000 per
| year instead of 40,000, the story becomes "Tesla and Google"
| murder 30,000 Americans every year. I don't think these
| companies could survive that amount of bad PR and legal
| liability.
|
| And yes, I get that self driving cars have safety network
| effects, but they need to be at least 1 order of magnitude
| safer, if not more BEFORE those network effects start to
| compound.
| stocknoob wrote:
| How often do transportation companies get sued in general? If
| the accident rate is the same as a bus, train, or airplane,
| why would this be different?
| nabakin wrote:
| It's because buses are controlled by people, not a computer
| made by the transportation company. If the transportation
| company wrote a program to control buses and it was
| responsible for an accident, the company would be at fault,
| but there is no transportation company which uses a program
| to drive buses so ofc this wouldn't apply.
|
| If the cause of the crash is the program, it's the
| company's fault. If the cause of the crash is a person,
| it's the person's fault. It's not that complicated.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _we shouldn 't expect them to have a perfect track record_
|
| I'm not interested in a self-driving car being better than the
| average person at driving. I'm already better-than-average.
|
| The cars need to be as good as the best drivers out there.
| xnx wrote:
| Are you interested in self-driving car being better than
| drivers who aren't you? Even if you are the best driver on
| the road, your safety will be greatly improved by removing
| drunk, drowsy, and distracted drivers.
|
| > The cars need to be as good as the best drivers out there.
|
| They're getting there. Self-driving vehicles already have
| huge advantages in sensors, attention, and reaction time.
| Progress on reasoning is improving steadily.
| jedberg wrote:
| There is already a standard for car to car communication. The
| brake lights and blinkers. Their signals move from one car to
| the next at light speed. It just takes humans a really long
| time to interpret the signals.
|
| But self driving cars can interpret them at the speed of light.
| cma wrote:
| They can be obscured though, like the car one car ahead of
| you suddenly braking. With additional radio communication
| that wouldn't be an issue. Tesla used to brag about the radar
| being able to bounce under the car in front of you to the car
| in front of it, but I think stopped talking about that when
| they removed radar.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| I always find these discussions funny, we are putting so
| much time and attention to a problem that is solved: moving
| many people, multiple locations, in a repeatable way
| safely, while maximizing for people and speed. They are
| called trains
| jedberg wrote:
| Trains don't go to my office. And it wouldn't make sense
| for them to do so.
| jedberg wrote:
| > With additional radio communication that wouldn't be an
| issue.
|
| Given the life and death potential, I consider any signal I
| get from another car "trust but verify". Having a radio
| signal about a car a few cars up would maybe get me to slow
| down but not emergency brake until I had more information.
|
| The hacking potential is just to great.
| cpeterso wrote:
| TCP for cars
| boulos wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Waymo, but not on the Safety Research team.
|
| The Ars article linked to the Waymo blog post [1], but the
| underlying paper is at [2] via waymo.com/safety . A lot of folks
| are assuming this wasn't corrected for location or surface
| streets, but all of the articles do attempt to mention that.
| (it's easier to miss in the Ars coverage, but it's there). The
| paper is naturally more thorough on this, but there's a simple
| diagram in the blog post, too.
|
| [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-
| outperfor...
|
| [2]
| https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This is the first time I've seen an AV PR push that is remotely
| apples-to-apples. Props to y'all for that.
| choppaface wrote:
| Do you know why Waymo didn't include the dog they killed in
| this report? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-
| driving-car-k...
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| I believe this study was about rider-only miles. The dog
| incident had a safety driver monitoring.
| choppaface wrote:
| Sure but the news outlet headline is 'only three minor
| incidents' when in fact they killed a dog. It's an act of
| not including all the information in a report about safety.
| happytiger wrote:
| Forgive me for this but all self-driving cars do is act as the
| default to postpone and diffuse support for scalable and long
| term (also driverless) infrastructure with the false promise that
| self driving cars that will somehow solve all our transportation
| needs.
|
| This technology will _increase_ the issues we have as a society
| around the use of a car based transportation system, as they are
| simultaneously expensive to maintain for low density environments
| while also conversely being almost impossible to maintain for
| high density environments.
|
| Car transport systems have no true limit on capacity so as the
| efficiency of the transportation system increases, so will demand
| and density.
|
| If everyone changes to another transportation system powered by
| Waymo and others, what's to stop a large number of people moving
| to self-driving cars, increasing the number on the road, and
| causing grid lock again meaning we have to increase massively the
| amount of car-centric infrastructure all over again. Isn't that
| what history has shown us will happen?
|
| Why do we keep supporting the most inefficient and expensive form
| of transport ever?
|
| Downvote if you must but it is a warranted and substitute
| argument and worth considering. Even if you think it's not or not
| on the appropriate post of whatever criticisms you wish to levy
| (or just as likely work on self-driving systems). It's always
| amazing to me how hard people will defend the status quo while
| calling themselves "technology innovators."
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Self driving cars are something that private companies can
| mostly do by themselves(beyond getting the okay from government
| to drive on public roads).
|
| Public mass transit infrastructure can't really be created by
| private companies.
|
| So, if you want mass transit, driverless cars really has
| nothing to do with it. Petition the government to get off their
| asses and do their job.
| happytiger wrote:
| https://apnews.com/article/highspeed-rail-trains-
| brightline-...
|
| Not sure that's actually true.
|
| Japan's has one of the most effective models and contrary to
| what most people believe is privately owned and operated.
| About 70 percent of Japan's railway network is operated by
| the Japan Railways (JR), while the rest is served by dozens
| of other private railway companies, especially in and around
| metropolitan areas.
|
| https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-
| info/rail/high_speed/s...
|
| There is a lot more going on here with self-driving cars
| being pushed as the only answer that is deeply worthy of
| examination and discussion, but private companies have been
| extremely successful in the past before the oil and car
| companies started acting like cartels and systematically
| dismantled and destroyed public transportation across the
| western world.
|
| Keeping "public transit" as a government only activity while
| convincing the public that government is impotent at its
| implementation was the core strategy.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-paper-trails-showing-
| car...
|
| https://medium.com/modern-city/how-the-united-states-
| ended-u...
|
| Look, I drive. I just think we can do better and deserve to
| have better conversations about alternatives than what we're
| having.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Note that almost all Japanese railways started out as
| public sector projects, and were handed off to private
| sector to operate. Urban rail _operations_ are within the
| wheelhouse of private organizations - but I don 't think
| actually building them out is. At very best it could only
| be done with an extremely tight partnership between public
| and private sectors. With self driving cars, the private
| sector is taking more or less a unilateral decision to
| invest in them, something which cannot be done with pretty
| much any mass transit project.
| happytiger wrote:
| Yes I agree with you about Japan. But the reason it was
| made private is because it was financially failing, as is
| China's hsr today.
|
| But I don't agree with you on your other point. Look at
| the first link I offered. We have our first commercial
| high speed rail project going online in the US and they
| are already breaking ground on the second -- LA to Vegas.
|
| We also have a long history of successful private transit
| systems.
|
| As has been written on hacker news before:
|
| > The public transit system used to be privately owned
| and operated. Then the cities took over and kicked out
| the private sector. Now we have terrible public transit.
|
| > Even the subways in NYC were built and operated by
| private companies (there were two, and they competed).
|
| Truth is we need both.
| bryan_w wrote:
| You use the word "we" a lot. What exactly has your involvement
| been in all this?
| happytiger wrote:
| Happy Holidays.
| triceratops wrote:
| What's another name for a shared self-driving taxi? A bus.
|
| Self-driving vehicles paired with congestion taxes could usher
| in a golden age of mass transit. The congestion tax is the
| important bit though.
| happytiger wrote:
| That's possible. But taxation tends to be regressive, and the
| funds generated tend to be diverted for other purposes by
| downstream governments.
| elicksaur wrote:
| > The ODD [Operational Design Domain] does not include severe
| weather conditions, such as thick fog, heavy rain, or blowing
| sand but does include light rain or light fog. [1]
|
| What is the crash rate for humans under good to light rain/fog
| conditions? This doesn't seem to be comparing apples to apples.
|
| [1]
| https://assets.ctfassets.net/e6t5diu0txbw/54ngcIlGK4EZnUapYv...
| bmitc wrote:
| ... in the easiest city and weather environments
| lucidrains wrote:
| slow and steady wins the race
| VincentEvans wrote:
| I find it a pretty optimistic take when someone claims success of
| a safety system after conducting a test that basically equals 600
| people using it for an average year worth of driving...
|
| Is it enough to support a pretty extraordinary claim that a fully
| self-driving system that will then be sold in millions of
| vehicles is now perfectly safe?
| hiddencost wrote:
| I don't think you're accurately representing how this will go.
|
| This is an incredible volume of data, and very encouraging.
| What it will justify is the ramp from 10k trips a week to 100k
| trips a week.
|
| As they go, they'll start rapidly collecting much more safety
| data, which will then be used to justify the ramp to 1M trips a
| week.
|
| As they roll out to new environments (snow, harder and new
| urban settings, airports) they're taking it slowly enough to
| collect strong evidence that it's a justified decision.
|
| And local regulators are scrutinizing this aggressively.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| Actually, I am ok with this, if the way you are describing is
| how it will go. Thanks for describing it, I hope this is the
| plan.
| wankerrific wrote:
| I mean, we could be spending effort on making _human_ driving
| safer, but where is the monopoly in that?
| happytiger wrote:
| Wow Waymo's PR team is absolutely killing it this week. They
| crushed their biggest competitor and now they are on the
| offensive.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Waymo's approach to
| self driving is a fool's errand. The only reason it works is that
| they have mapped out cities with straightforward roads and sunny
| weather to millimeter precision, and have hardcoded vehicles to
| operate in those conditions.
|
| Compare this to Tesla's AI-first approach, aggregating training
| data from millions of drivers across the US. There's no overhead
| to introducing Autopilot in a new city it's never been in before
| --it just "works," with no expensive 3D mapping required, by
| extrapolating cheaply acquired vision data from other cities.
|
| Elon really got this right from the beginning, but Waymo's
| aggressive PR and marketing have pitted public opinion against
| Tesla, as is very clearly evident even in these HN comments.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| I feel like I read this exact comment in 2018. And I am certain
| I'll read it again in 2028, even as Waymo is operating in
| dozens of cities and serving millions of trips per week.
| Because with the Tesla religion, the magical AI rapture is
| always just around the corner.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > The only reason it works is that they have mapped out cities
| with straightforward roads and sunny weather to millimeter
| precision, and have hardcoded vehicles to operate in those
| conditions.
|
| Yet it actually works. Going to level 4 and slowly adding areas
| prioritizes safety and reduces the risk of project failure. You
| can argue the Waymo approach is slower, but is the only one
| that has worked so far.
|
| > There's no overhead to introducing Autopilot in a new city
| it's never been in before--it just "works,"
|
| Yet it doesn't. For all their grandstanding, Tesla has remained
| stuck at level 3 for years. I wouldn't say that trading cheap
| deployment for public safety is something we should praise.
| xnx wrote:
| > it just "works,"
|
| For certain values of "works"
|
| > Elon really got this right from the beginning, but Waymo's
| aggressive PR and marketing have pitted public opinion against
| Tesla
|
| Consider the opposite
| Animats wrote:
| > Consider the opposite
|
| Um, yes.
|
| Watch videos from Waymo customers in San Francisco. There are
| plenty of them online. See Waymo cars navigate San Francisco.
| See them cope successfully with traffic cones, bicycles,
| cable car tracks tracks, double-parked delivery trucks, small
| animals, construction, and wandering druggies.[1][2] Totally
| automatic. Nobody behind the wheel.
|
| Then watch videos of Tesla self-driving in a city, with the
| latest "beta self driving". Two manual interventions in the
| first minute.[3]
|
| Waymo has real self-driving. Tesla has fake self-driving.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7LXFjQ7hHs
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBvce_eC28A
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDxjB6bFLRg
| xnx wrote:
| I agree completely. I'd say something more like "Waymo
| really got this right from the beginning, but Uber, Tesla,
| and Cruise's behavior have poisoned opinions about self-
| driving"
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Much the same way you have cherry-picked examples of Waymo
| doing well and FSD not doing well, I too can cherry-pick
| examples of FSD doing well and Waymo not doing well.
|
| I would encourage you to review the actual data. FSD is
| currently the industry leader in numbers of miles driven
| per incident.
| https://x.com/TashaARK/status/1727463951254863949
|
| I expect this to improve even more with FSD 12.
| Animats wrote:
| Tesla's definition of "crash" is "we count all crashes in
| which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other
| active restraint deployed."[1] Waymo's definition of
| "crash" includes minor fender-benders.
|
| [1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
| ra7 wrote:
| This is full of misinformation, the kind Musk and Tesla fans
| have spread for years about their self driving competitors.
|
| All of this is easily proven wrong. Waymo works in rain and fog
| in hilly San Francisco flawlessly. There are YouTube videos
| anyone can look up. One look at https://waymo.com/research/
| tells you they're using more AI than everyone else combined.
| They've used an ML-based planner for years now. Saying they
| have "hardcoded" to drive at the scale of entire cities is just
| dumb. Somehow only Tesla fans think it's possible.
|
| Tesla has no overhead introducing in a new city because,
| obviously, it's a driver assistance system. It "works" only
| because there's a driver ready to prevent crashes. That's not a
| fully autonomous system by any stretch of imagination.
| cornholio wrote:
| Yes, the Tesla approach is superior - if it could be made to
| work. Waymo is an inferior product that works today and is
| available. I'm sure the superior product will quickly recover
| and compensate for the first mover advantage of Waymo by way of
| sheer awesomeness. By then, we will all use Betamax cameras,
| minidiscs and the GNU/Hurd operating system.
| boh wrote:
| I remember Cruise showing similar numbers and then at some point
| they ran over a woman and lost their right to operate in the
| state of California and GM cut 20% of Cruise's workforce.
|
| I guess it's pointless to point out the WeWork-level of creative
| reporting bcs the "if we can just save one life" people don't
| want to hear it. The reality outside of the engineering bubble is
| that self-driving is an expensive dud with a smaller potential
| market than initially hoped (major cities like NYC will not see
| self-driving anytime soon). The expectation that there just needs
| to be a little more time for development has run its course and
| money for speculative bets are harder to come by (especially for
| something that's burned through so much cash already).
| dontreact wrote:
| To me safety is mostly about the risk of injury and death to me.
| And mostly about death.
|
| Humans die from driving only once every 100 million miles on
| average.
|
| So until there is a comparison at this scale, to me it's a very
| incomplete picture of safety to say that you are outperforming
| humans.
|
| If driving my own car means colliding 100x as often but I expect
| to die 2x less often, I would consider self driving to be much
| much much more unsafe. There is really no way for me to
| understand the risk of fatalities from a sample of only 7 million
| miles, since either humans or a system with 2x the fatality rate
| of humans would both be expected to have 0 fatalities at this
| scale.
|
| Given we are at 7m miles, hopefully this comparison is coming
| soon and I will be much more convinced.
| cespare wrote:
| I guess to me it seems like common sense that a system that has
| substantially fewer crashes also has substantially fewer
| deaths. Maybe we can't make definitive statements about the
| expected number of deaths yet, but I think the most reasonable
| best guess with the information we have is that waymo deaths
| will be much lower.
|
| The alternative requires a scenario where waymo is especially
| likely to get into fatal accidents while being very good at
| avoiding non-fatal ones, right? Seems far-fetched.
| dontreact wrote:
| I would not make the same inference because we know that ML
| systems generally struggle with robustness and the long tail,
| while humans tend to be exhibit much more flexibility to
| adapt to distribution shifts or unusual situations. For a
| concrete example of this in computer vision, see work such as
| the Imagenet--C dataset where simple distribution shifts
| generally tank ML models but do not impact human performance.
|
| But regardless, the claim here isn't "under some assumptions
| that some people (and not others) find reasonable, we can
| extrapolate and predict that self driving cars will be found
| to be safer"
|
| It's "self driving cars are safer", which there isn't enough
| evidence to claim yet.
| brightball wrote:
| This, plus there's a control aspect. People fear flying largely
| because they aren't in control, even though it's technical
| safer than driving. But driving...you're in control.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Actually I don't care about these kind of "benchmark" . I just
| ask waymo to start running commercial trucks with goods only on
| closed roads first that should make it profit of it really works.
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